INSTALLING AND USING A SUBSET OF ROUTES

摘要

In one embodiment, an Internet Protocol (IP) routing information base of a packet switching device is filtered to produce a significantly smaller subset of IP routes that are installed in one or more forwarding information bases for forwarding of IP packets. In one embodiment, these smaller forwarding information bases are located in memory local to a network processor to more quickly perform lookup operations thereon. In one embodiment, one or more of these forwarding information bases is used only for exact matching of addresses (not longest prefix matching). In one embodiment, the IP routes in these smaller forwarding information bases substantially correspond to packet switching devices in a network (e.g., core and edge routers), such as in contrast to including all the IP routes for devices external to the network.