Patent ID: 11929837
Assignee: MELLANOX TECHNOLOGIES, LTD.
Field: Digital communication (Electrical engineering)
Classification: CPC H  G | IPC G  H

Claim 11:
12. A packet classification method, comprising:
in a network device, storing rules corresponding to a corpus of rules in respective rule entries, wherein each rule comprising a respective set of unmasked bits having corresponding bit values, and at least some of the rules comprising masked bits, and wherein the rules in the corpus conform to respective Rule Patterns (RPs), each RP defining a respective sequence of masked and unmasked bits;
clustering the RPs, using a clustering criterion, into extended Rule Patterns (eRPs) associated with respective hash tables comprising buckets for storing rule entries, wherein the clustering criterion aims to minimize an overall number of the eRPs while meeting a collision condition that depends on a specified maximal number of rule entries per bucket;
defining a collision event indicating that a number of rule entries contained in a bucket exceeds a specified maximal number of rule entries per bucket, and evaluating the collision condition by comparing between a number of collision events occurring in constructing a temporary eRP and a predefined limit number;
receiving a packet from a communication network via a port; and
classifying the received packet in a decision logic pipeline using the eRPs.