Improving gateway performance with a routing-table cache

A way to increase gateway throughput is to reduce the routing-table lookup time per packet. A routing-table cache can be used to reduce the average lookup time per packet and the purpose of this study is to determine the best management policies for this cache as well as its measured performance. The performance results of simulated caches for a gateway at MIT are presented. These results include the probability of reference versus previous access time, cache hit ratios, and the number of packets between cache misses. A simple, conservative analysis using the presented measurements shows that current gateway routing-table lookup time could be reduced by up to 65%.>