Fast incremental CRC updates for IP over ATM networks

Abstract

In response to the increasing network speeds, many operations in IP routers and similar devices are being made more efficient. With the advances in other areas of packet processing, the verification and regeneration of cyclic redundancy check (CRC) codes of the data link layer is likely to become a bottleneck in the near future. In this paper, we present a mechanism to defer CRC verification without compromising reliability. This opens the possibility of incremental updates of the CRC. We introduce a new high-speed technique and present efficient implementations, speeding up CRC processing by a factor of 15. Although the paper and analysis focuses on IP over ATM, the scheme applies to a much wider set of network protocols.