Efficient IP address retrieval using a novel octet based encoding technique for high speed lookup to improve network performance.

As the Internet becomes increasingly popular, the number of users connected to it grows significantly. Consequently, the packet processing speed of network systems, such as routers, must be enhanced. IP lookup is a critical task used to find the next hop address by searching for the longest prefix match in the forwarding information base (FIB). The binary trie is one of the most popular software-based approaches for IP lookup. Prefix compression techniques can improve both the time and space complexity of IP lookups, thereby enhancing overall system performance. This paper proposes an efficient deterministic approach to encoding IP prefixes that reduces storage complexity. The proposed technique generates a unique index for each prefix using an encoder, enabling searches to be performed in constant time. Experimental results show that the proposed method improves lookup time by 73%, 65%, and 66% compared to the existing binary trie, path-compressed trie, and multibit trie, respectively. Additionally, it achieves approximately 63% memory savings over these existing techniques.