How Much TCAM do we Need for Splitting Traffic?

Abstract

Traffic splitting is a required functionality in networks, for example for load balancing over paths or servers or by the source's access restrictions. The capacities of the servers (or the number of users with particular access restrictions) determine the sizes of the parts into which traffic should be split. A recent approach implements traffic splitting within the ternary content addressable memory (TCAM), which is often available in switches. It is important to reduce the amount of memory allocated for this task since TCAMs are power consuming and are often also required for other tasks such as classification and routing. Recent works suggested algorithms to compute a smallest implementation of a given partition in the longest prefix match (LPM) model. In this paper we analyze properties of such minimal representations and prove lower and upper bounds on their size. The upper bounds hold for general TCAMs, and we also prove an additional lower-bound for general TCAMs.