METHOD, HARDWARE ARCHITECTURE AND RECORDING MEDIUM FOR SEARCHING IP ADDRESS BY USING PIPELINE BINARY TREE

The present invention relates to an IP address lookup method, a hardware architecture, and a recording medium. The present invention relates to an IP address lookup method searching the longest matched prefix by constructing a binary tree having enclosure prefixes as root nodes, extracting sub-trees of enclosures as individual trees from a maintree in the binary tree, and comparing an input address with prefixes included in nodes of the maintree and nodes of the sub-trees by using a pipelining scheme, a hardware architecture, and a recording medium. According to the present invention, it is possible to efficiently utilize a memory by using the best advantage of a binary prefix tree structure in that there is no empty node in the tree and the fact that a binary search process can be implemented by using pipelines. In addition, it is possible to provide a practical, excellent architecture capable of performing an address lookup procedure by using at most one content addressable memory access and one memory access.