| 摘要 |
The present invention relates to the field of communication technologies, and discloses a method and an apparatus for forwarding packets to solve the problems in the prior art, namely, if a long Internet Protocol (IP) address needs to be searched for at the time of forwarding a packet, the number of Ternary Content Addressable Memories (TCAMs) need to be increased, or an external Random Access Memory (RAM) needs to be accessed for more times, which leads to a high cost and low performance. The method includes: extracting a first bit sequence from a destination address of a received packet, and using the first bit sequence as a key value; searching for a preset TCAM entry by using the key value, and obtaining an index value returned by the TCAM entry; and using the index value and a second group of bits in the destination address of the packet as conditions for searching, according to a predetermined algorithm, for a preset Forwarding Information Base (FIB) entry, and obtaining a forwarding address of the packet. The technical solution under the present invention is applicable to searching a table for an Internet Protocol version 6 (IPv6) address in a router.
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