Pmc-sierra, Inc.

Pmc-sierra Us, Inc.

Ramana Rao

Sundar Iyer

Raghunath Iyer

Moti Jiandani

Subhash Bal

As Internet packet flow increases, the demand for high speed packet filtering has grown. The present invention introduces a high-speed rule processing method that may be used for packet filtering. The method pre-processes a set of packet filtering rules such that the rules may be searched in parallel by a set of independent search units. Specifically, the rules are divided into N orthogonal dimensions that comprise aspects of each packet that may be examined and tested. Each of the N dimensions are then divided into a set of dimension rule ranges. Each rule range is assigned a value that specifies the rules that may apply in that range. The rule preprocessing is completed by creating a search structure to be used for classifying a packet into one of the rule ranges in each of the N dimensions. Each search structure may be used by an independent search unit such that all N dimensions may be searched concurrently. The packet processing method of the present invention activates the N independent search units to search the N pre-processor created search structures. The output of each of the N search structures is then logically combined to select a rule to be applied.

Method and apparatus for high-speed network rule processing

As Internet packet flow increases, the demand for high speed packet filtering has grown. The present invention introduces several methods for a high-speed rule processing. The methods are geared towards Internet Protocol (IP) packet processing.

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Hyderabad Telangana, India

Ramana Rao