"David S. Miller" [off-list ref] writes:

Although, I hope it's not "too similar" to what CEF does because
undoubtedly Cisco has a bazillion patents in this area.

Most things in this area are patented, and the patents are extremely
fuzzy (e.g. policy-based routing with hierarchical sequence of
decisions has been patented countless times). 8-(

This is actually an argument for coming up with out own algorithms
without any knowledge of what CEF does or might do. :(

The branchless variant is not described in the IOS book, and I can't
tell if Cisco routers use it.  If this idea is really novel, we are in
pretty good shape because we no longer use trees, tries or whatever,
but a DFA. 8-)

Further parameters which could be tweaked is the kind of adjacency
information (where to store the L2 information, whether to include the
prefix length in the adjacency record etc.).