PEDS: A parallel error detection scheme for TCAM devices

Anat Bremler-Barr; David Hay; Danny Hendler; Ron M. Roth

doi:10.1109/TNET.2010.2047730

PEDS: A parallel error detection scheme for TCAM devices

Anat Bremler-Barr^*, David Hay, Danny Hendler, Ron M. Roth

^*Corresponding author for this work

Research output: Contribution to journal › Article › peer-review

13 Scopus citations

Abstract

Ternary content-addressable memory (TCAM) devices are increasingly used for performing high-speed packet classification. A TCAM consists of an associative memory that compares a search key in parallel against all entries. TCAMs may suffer from error events that cause ternary cells to change their value to any symbol in the ternary alphabet {0,1,*}. Due to their parallel access feature, standard error detection schemes are not directly applicable to TCAMs; an additional difficulty is posed by the special semantic of the * symbol. This paper introduces PEDS, a novel parallel error detection scheme that locates the erroneous entries in a TCAM device. PEDS is based on applying an error-detecting code to each TCAM entry and utilizing the parallel capabilities of the TCAM by simultaneously checking the correctness of multiple TCAM entries. A key feature of PEDS is that the number of TCAM lookup operations required to locate all errors depends on the number of symbols per entry in a manner that is typically orders of magnitude smaller than the number of TCAM entries. For large TCAM devices, a specific instance of PEDS requires only 200 lookups for 100-symbol entries, while a naive approach may need hundreds of thousands of lookups. PEDS allows flexible and dynamic selection of tradeoff points between robustness, space complexity, and number of lookups.

Original language	English
Article number	5454422
Pages (from-to)	1665-1675
Number of pages	11
Journal	IEEE/ACM Transactions on Networking
Volume	18
Issue number	5
DOIs	https://doi.org/10.1109/TNET.2010.2047730
State	Published - Oct 2010
Externally published	Yes

Bibliographical note

Funding Information:
Manuscript received December 04, 2009; accepted March 21, 2010; approved by IEEE/ACM TRANSACTIONS ON NETWORKING Editor D. Towsley. Date of publication April 26, 2010; date of current version October 15, 2010. Patent pending. This work was supported by a research grant from Cisco Systems, Inc. A. Bremler-Barr is with the Efi Arazi School of Computer Science, The Interdisciplinary Center, Herzliya 46150, Israel (e-mail: [email protected]). D. Hay was with the Computer Science Department, Ben-Gurion University, Be’er Sheva 84105, Israel. He is now with the Electrical Engineering Department, Columbia University, New York, NY 10027 USA (e-mail: [email protected]). D. Hendler is with the Computer Science Department, Ben-Gurion University, Be’er Sheva 84105, Israel (e-mail: [email protected]). R. M. Roth is with the Computer Science Department, Technion—Israel Institute of Technology, Haifa 32000, Israel (e-mail: [email protected]). Color versions of one or more of the figures in this paper are available online at http://ieeexplore.ieee.org. Digital Object Identifier 10.1109/TNET.2010.2047730

Keywords

error detection
error-correcting codes
error-detecting codes
packet classification
ternary content-addressable memory (TCAM)

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Cite this

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title = "PEDS: A parallel error detection scheme for TCAM devices",

abstract = "Ternary content-addressable memory (TCAM) devices are increasingly used for performing high-speed packet classification. A TCAM consists of an associative memory that compares a search key in parallel against all entries. TCAMs may suffer from error events that cause ternary cells to change their value to any symbol in the ternary alphabet {0,1,*}. Due to their parallel access feature, standard error detection schemes are not directly applicable to TCAMs; an additional difficulty is posed by the special semantic of the * symbol. This paper introduces PEDS, a novel parallel error detection scheme that locates the erroneous entries in a TCAM device. PEDS is based on applying an error-detecting code to each TCAM entry and utilizing the parallel capabilities of the TCAM by simultaneously checking the correctness of multiple TCAM entries. A key feature of PEDS is that the number of TCAM lookup operations required to locate all errors depends on the number of symbols per entry in a manner that is typically orders of magnitude smaller than the number of TCAM entries. For large TCAM devices, a specific instance of PEDS requires only 200 lookups for 100-symbol entries, while a naive approach may need hundreds of thousands of lookups. PEDS allows flexible and dynamic selection of tradeoff points between robustness, space complexity, and number of lookups.",

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note = "Funding Information: Manuscript received December 04, 2009; accepted March 21, 2010; approved by IEEE/ACM TRANSACTIONS ON NETWORKING Editor D. Towsley. Date of publication April 26, 2010; date of current version October 15, 2010. Patent pending. This work was supported by a research grant from Cisco Systems, Inc. A. Bremler-Barr is with the Efi Arazi School of Computer Science, The Interdisciplinary Center, Herzliya 46150, Israel (e-mail: [email protected]). D. Hay was with the Computer Science Department, Ben-Gurion University, Be{\textquoteright}er Sheva 84105, Israel. He is now with the Electrical Engineering Department, Columbia University, New York, NY 10027 USA (e-mail: [email protected]). D. Hendler is with the Computer Science Department, Ben-Gurion University, Be{\textquoteright}er Sheva 84105, Israel (e-mail: [email protected]). R. M. Roth is with the Computer Science Department, Technion—Israel Institute of Technology, Haifa 32000, Israel (e-mail: [email protected]). Color versions of one or more of the figures in this paper are available online at http://ieeexplore.ieee.org. Digital Object Identifier 10.1109/TNET.2010.2047730",

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PEDS: A parallel error detection scheme for TCAM devices

Abstract

Bibliographical note

Keywords

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