Route summarization and binary-based routing decision

[afourmy]

Right now, I build the routing table for each router as a dictionnary that binds an IP address (destination) to the next hop. I need to summarize the routes to reduce the number of entries in the routing table when the network is big.
During the routing process, I need to find the summarized address that contains the IP address of the destination: the fastest way to do so could be to look for the longest prefix match in binary, like in real-life networks.
Perhaps it would be best to store the IP address in both binary and decimal formats right after I create it, so that I don't have to convert back and forth every time I need one of them.

Details here:
http://www.ciscopress.com/articles/article.asp?p=174107&seqNum=3
and more details in the checkio task I created:
https://checkio.org/mission/ip-network-route-summarization/