Energy efficient exact matching for flow identification with cuckoo affinity hashing

Energy efficiency has become an important design goal for networking equipment. Traditionally routers and switches have been designed to minimize peak power consumption but they operate most of the time with settings and traffic that is far from that peak. Therefore, many elements and functions of networking equipment are being redesigned to improve energy efficiency. A common functionality in networking is flow identification that is needed in many applications. Flow identification can be implemented with Content Addressable Memories (CAMs) or alternatively with several data structures. Among those, one efficient option is Cuckoo hashing that enables fast searches and high memory utilization at the cost of complicating the insertion procedure. In this letter, first the energy efficiency of exact matching using Cuckoo hashing is analyzed and then a technique is presented to improve the energy efficiency of Cuckoo hashing. The proposed scheme is evaluated using a traffic monitoring application and compared with the traditional Cuckoo hashing. The results show that significant energy savings can be obtained by using the proposed technique.