K. Seppänen (Finland)
Communication protocols, IP routers, address lookup algorithms, IPv6
The 32-bit address space provided by IPv4 is running out quite soon. The new Internet Protocol version, IPv6, in creases the length of IP address to 128 bits. Such address space should be more than adequate for all future needs. Nevertheless, there are worries concerning the impact of the need to handle very long addresses to the performance of the IP routers. This has lead to efforts to show the scala bility of existing IPv4 address lookup algorithms and, if the scalability is lacking, efforts to modify them to better suit for 128 bit addresses. However, those efforts can be vain as the address structure in IPv6 is constructed in a quite different way compared to IPv4. Thus the address lookup operation can be done in a totally new way. The new meth ods can utilise simple table lookup operations and thus they can easily exceed the speed of existing IPv4 address lookup algorithms.
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