Abstract: Features of global routing table and prefix updates were analysized. A parallel IP address lookup scheme based on leaf nodes called Leaf_caf TCAM was proposed. The global routing table is partitioned into subtables and put into K independent TCAM chips. Our scheme can get speedup factor K-1 with0.1*(K-1) redundant. Prefix expansion is not needed and over 90 0 o prefix updates can be done in random mode. Our scheme can partition the routing table evenly and has low cost when the sub-table is overflow. The power cunsumption is only 12 0 0 of traditional single chip scheme.

Key words: IP address lookup, Parallel, Leaf-TCAM