Constructing optimal non-overlap routing tables

The size of routing tables has been growing rapidly, while the link transmission speed of Internet backbone has increased up to 100Gbps commercially and towards 400Gbps Ethernet for laboratory experiments. In order to alleviate the pressure from both the huge large routing table and very high interface speed, ISPs are trying to find ways to compress the table while striving to design a more powerful lookup engine. To address this issue, we propose an algorithm, named Optimal Non-overlap Routing Table Constructor (ONRTC), to compute an equivalent routing table with a minimal number of prefixes under the constraint that all the prefixes are not overlapped. Experimental evaluations show that, for large backbone routing tables, the ONRTC algorithm requires only about 71% of the original number of prefixes. We release ONRTC's source code in [10].