Introduction TCAMs are not well-suited for representing rules that contain range fields. The resulting range expansion can be dramatically reduce TCAM utilization. Observation : The majority of real-life database ranges are short. 60% unique length 40% length less than 20 This paper present a novel algorithm called Short Range Gray Encoding (SRGE). SRGE encodes range borders as binary reflected gray codes and represents the resulting range by a minimal set of ternary string. To the best of our knowledge, SRGE is the first algorithm that significantly reduces range expansion without resorting to use of extra bits. To further improve TCAM utilization, we use extra bits by employing hybrid- SRGE scheme. 3
