Abstract

The ability to provide differentiated services to users with widely varying requirements is becoming increasingly important, and Internet Service Providers would like to provide these differentiated services using the same shared network infrastructure. The key mechanism, that enables differentiation in a connectionless network, is the packet classification function that parses the headers of the packets, and after determining their context, classifies them based on administrative policies or real-time reservation decisions. Packet classification, however, is a complex operation that can become the bottleneck in routers that try to support gigabit link capacities. Hence, many proposals for differentiated services only require classification at lower speed edge routers and also avoid classification based on multiple fields in the packet header even if it might be advantageous to service providers. In this paper, we present new packet classification schemes that, with a worst-case and tr...

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