Algorithms and architectures for packet classification

通过查看行业领军企业的销售数据，估计全球路由器和交换机的年销售额在200亿至300亿美元之间。拟议计划的目标是推动数据包分类方面的最先进技术，这是这些设备中使用的基本技术。包分类通常是将包中选定字段的内容与一组过滤条件进行比较，确定包是否与这些条件中的一个或多个匹配，然后在一个或多个匹配的情况下选择最佳操作的操作。近期的前景是以每秒太比特的速度运行的链路，以及允许数亿个子网的新寻址形式。这意味着分类器将不得不在每条链路上每秒处理数十亿个信息包，而过滤器集将从数万条规则增加到数百万条。为了实现这一未来，需要新的分组分类算法和实现。

Global sales of routers and switches, estimated by looking at the sales figures of the industry leaders, are in the range of $20 billion to $30 billion annually. The objective of the proposed program is to push the state of the art in packet classification, which is the fundamental technique used in these devices. Packet classification, very generally, is the operation of comparing the contents of selected fields in a packet to a set of filter conditions, deciding whether the packet matches one or more of those conditions, and then selecting the best action in the case of one or more matches. The near term prospects are for links running at terabits per second, and new forms of addressing that will allow for hundreds of millions of subnets. This means that classifiers will have to deal with billions of packets per second per link, and that filter sets will grow from tens of thousands of rules to millions. New algorithms and implementations of packet classification are required to enable this future.