Appendix B. Efficient Time Value Approximation

Appendix B. Efficient Time Value Approximation

A forwarder frequently converts compact time into milliseconds to compare Interest Lifetimes and the duration of cache entries. On many architectures, multiplication and division perform slower than addition, subtraction, and bit shifts. The following equations approximate the formulas in Section 4, and scale from seconds into the milliseconds range by applying a factor of 2^10 instead of 10^3. This results in an error of 2.4%.

b == 0:

2^10 * a * 2^-3 * 2^1 * 2^-5
= a << 3

b > 0:

(2^10 + a * 2^-3 * 2^10) * 2^b * 2^-5
= (1 << 5 + a << 2) << b