Memory-efficient and Ultra-fast Network Lookup and Forwarding using Othello Hashing

TL;DR

This paper introduces Othello Hashing and Concise, a memory-efficient and ultra-fast network lookup method for FIBs that outperforms existing solutions in speed and memory usage, supporting dynamic updates in programmable networks.

Contribution

The paper presents Othello Hashing and Concise, a novel approach that optimizes memory and speed for network name lookups, with a design that separates complex construction from fast querying.

Findings

Concise uses significantly less memory than existing solutions.

Concise achieves much faster query speeds.

Experimental results validate the efficiency and speed of Concise.

Abstract

Network algorithms always prefer low memory cost and fast packet processing speed. Forwarding information base (FIB), as a typical network processing component, requires a scalable and memory-efficient algorithm to support fast lookups. In this paper, we present a new network algorithm, Othello Hashing, and its application of a FIB design called Concise, which uses very little memory to support ultra-fast lookups of network names. Othello Hashing and Concise make use of minimal perfect hashing and relies on the programmable network framework to support dynamic updates. Our conceptual contribution of Concise is to optimize the memory efficiency and query speed in the data plane and move the relatively complex construction and update components to the resource-rich control plane. We implemented Concise on three platforms. Experimental results show that Concise uses significantly smaller memory to achieve much faster query speed compared to existing solutions of network name lookups.