Rule Modification in Decision Trees

摘要

A system, apparatus, and method are provided for modifying rules in-place atomically from the perspective of an active search process using the rules for packet classification. A rule may be modified in-place by updating a rule's definition to be an intersection of an original and new definition. The rule's definition may be further updated to the rule's new definition and a decision tree may used updated based on the rule's new definition. While a search processor searches for one or more rules that match keys generated from received packets the in-place rule modification prevents periods of incorrect rule matching of the keys thereby preventing packet loss and preserving throughput.