Main memory database techniques for routing lookups in the Internet

Main Memory Databases are becoming popular recently for their fast response time and high data performance. In this thesis, we will first identify a problem area where real time access and high performance is required and then we will propose main memory database approach to tackle that problem.; The Internet is comprised of packet-processing nodes, called routers, that route packets towards their destinations, and physical links that transport packets from one router to another. Advances in technologies over the years have rapidly increased the data rates of the communication lines. However, routers have failed to keep up with this speed because they must perform expensive per-packet processing operations. Every router is required to perform a forwarding decision on an incoming packet to determine the packet's next-hop router. This is achieved by looking up the destination address of the incoming packet in a forwarding table. Besides increased packet arrival rates because of high speed links, the complexity of the forwarding lookup mechanism and the large size of forwarding tables have made routing lookups a bottleneck in the backbone routers that form the core of the Internet. In the first part of this thesis, we will describe some fast and efficient routing lookup algorithms that attempt to overcome this bottleneck. In the second part of this thesis, we propose a new approach for routing lookups using the fast database technology called Main Memory Databases (MMDB).