Boosting FIB Caching Performance with Aggregation

In the era of high-performance cloud computations, networks need to ensure fast packet forwarding. This task is carried by TCAM forwarding chips that perform line-rate Longest Prefix Matches in a Forwarding Information Base (FIB). However, with the increasing number of prefixes in IPv4 and IPv6 routing tables the price of TCAM increases as well. In this work, we present a novel FIB compression technique by adding an aggregation layer into a FIB caching architecture. In Combined FIB Caching and Aggregation (CFCA), cache-hit ratio is maximized up to 99.94% with only 2.50% entries of the FIB, while the churn in TCAM is reduced by more than 40% compared to low-churn FIB aggregation techniques.