One challenging issue in IPv6 high speed routers’ design is the multi-field classification at line-rate for interface OC-192 and beyond.This paper proposes an efficient ultra-high speed IPv6 packet classification engine (classifier) based on TCAM (Ternary Content Addressable Memory).The key ideas are:(1) encoding the five fields according to their distinct features:we compress the IPv6 source/destination address fields based on the features of their formats and the distribution styles

apply an extended hierarchical coding method to TCP source/destination port fields and encode the protocol field based on the statistics.In this way

the original five-tuple with 296-bit length is converted into a 280-bit one which can fit well into the configured width of existing commercial TCAMs;(2) an embedded SSRAM table search technique is adopted to independently encode the five fields in parallel

eliminating the encoding bottleneck and guaranteeing the line-rate processing;(3) The rules of the classifier are stored in TCAMs according to the pre-designed coding formats.Utilization of pipeline makes the field coding operation and the rule’s search running parallel

which results the classifier outputting a search result within a single TCAM access.What’s more

to effectively solve the range matching problem

we present a dynamic range encoding scheme which greatly reduces the storage requirement for TCAMs and increases the updating speed.Analysis and simulation demonstrate that running TCAMs at a frequency of 66MHZ( relatively low)

the engine can reach a speed of over 22M packets per second (Mpps) for both the lookup and the packet classification respectively when integrated

and this perfectly satisfies the OC-192 interface’s line-rate processing.