US Patent 10135734 Pipelined evaluations for algorithmic forwarding route lookup

Packet processors or other devices with packet processing pipelines may implement pipelined evaluations of algorithmic forwarding route lookups. As network packets are received, a destination address for the network packets may be divided into different possible prefix lengths and corresponding entries in a routing table for the different possible prefix lengths may be determined according to a hash scheme for the routing table. The entry values may be read from the routing table and evaluated at subsequent stages to identify the entry with a longest prefix match with respect to the destination address for the network packet. The routing table may include entries for different types of network packets and may be configured to include virtual routing and forwarding for network packets.