Improving Performance of Digest Caches in Network Processors

Digest caches have been proposed as an effective method to speed up packet classification in network processors. In this paper, the authors show that the presence of a large number of small flows and a few large flows in the Internet has an adverse impact on the performance of these digest caches. In the Internet, a few large flows transfer a majority of the packets whereas the contribution of several small flows to the total number of packets transferred is small.