Producing a High Hit Ratio and Low Search Time in Forwarding Routing Tables by Predicting IP Addresses

In computer networks, fast routing is one of the main factors to speed up the transmission of the IP packets from the source to the destination computers. A router has a forwarding table (cache table) and a routing table. The forwarding table is derived from the routing table, which is maintained constantly by the router by using one of the common routing protocols. There are two factors that affect the speed of the forwarding decisions. First, when a forwarding table holds a huge number of IP addresses, a complicated search algorithm is needed, which implies a high search time. Second, the availability of the incoming IP address in the forwarding table (hit rate) reduces the extended search in the routing table. In our study, we look at the IP address streams. We built two models to predict the IP addresses. These models are plugged into the cache system simulation to pre-fetch the IP addresses prior to the router requests. The prediction scheme produces a higher hit ratio in comparison with the current cache schemes.