Survey on multi field packet classification techniques

Abstract

The latest research frontier on next-generation routers targets at more integration of advanced networking capabilities and functions including firewall operations, memory access control, quality of service (QoS) management, policy routing, and traffic billing. To realize such services, the router should be able to categorize the packets into different flows depending on already defined rule set called classifier, which contains a range of values of different fields in the packet header. The stated functions are defined as multi field classification. The increase in link rate and the size of classifier creates the challenge in multi field packet classification in the design of faster routers. We present a survey on various algorithms and architectures proposed for multi field packet classification that achieves higher throughput.