June 28, 2020—

A chat about forwarding

A chat with Mario Baldi about packet forwarding and the techniques and implications of different approaches in the control and data planes.

By: Heather Morris, Andrew Enoch


This Podcast was originally posted on Silvano Gai’s blog here.

Techniques and algorithms to forward packets have been a topic of discussion since the eighties. In this podcast, I chat with Mario Baldi about forwarding. Mario has also his own blog at https://blog.baldi.info/

We informally cover:

  • Layer 2 vs. layer 3 forwarding
  • ACLs processing
  • Binary vs. ternary matches
  • Binary hash table forwarding
  • Ternary LPM (Longest Prefix Match) forwarding
  • Combining forwarding with ACLs
  • Flow cache based forwarding
  • Forwarding in routers and NICs
  • Label-based forwarding
  • Segment routing


My book has a full Chapter on this topics (Chapter 2).

Don’t Forget that Pearson/Addison-Wesley has a special offer on my latest book. To save 35% on the book or eBook go to the informit website and use code FUTUREPROOF during checkout to apply the discount. Offer expires December 31, 2020

Book Cover

You can read an independent review of the book here.

The book was also listed in The Top 10 Best Cloud Storage Books You Need to Read in 2020.

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