Improved BGP convergence via ghost flushing

Labovitz et al. (2001) and Labovitz et al. (2000) noticed that sometimes it takes border gateway protocol (BGP) a substantial amount of time and messages to converge and stabilize following the failure of some node in the Internet. In this paper, we suggest a minor modification to BGP that eliminates the problem pointed out and substantially reduces the convergence time and communication complexity of BGP. Roughly speaking, our modification ensures that bad news (the failure of a node/edge) propagate fast, while good news (the establishment of a new path to a destination) propagate somewhat slower. This is achieved in BGP by allowing withdrawal messages to propagate with no delay as fast as the network forward them, while announcements propagate as they do in BGP with a delay at each node of one minRouteAdver (except for the first wave of announcements). As a by product of this work, a new stateless mechanism to overcome the counting to infinity problem is provided, which compares favorably with other known stateless mechanisms (in RIP and IGRP).

[1]  J. J. Garcia-Lunes-Aceves.  Loop-free routing using diffusing computations , 1993 .

[2]  Yakov Rekhter,et al.  A Border Gateway Protocol 4 (BGP-4) , 1994, RFC.

[3]  Gordon T. Wilfong,et al.  An analysis of BGP convergence properties , 1999, SIGCOMM '99.

[4]  Timothy G. Griffin,et al.  An experimental analysis of BGP convergence time , 2001, Proceedings Ninth International Conference on Network Protocols. ICNP 2001.

[5]  Abhijit Bose,et al.  Delayed internet routing convergence , 2000, SIGCOMM.

[6]  Davor Obradovic,et al.  Real-time model and convergence time of BGP , 2002, Proceedings.Twenty-First Annual Joint Conference of the IEEE Computer and Communications Societies.

[7]  Radia Perlman.  Interconnections: Bridges and Routers , 1992 .

[8]  J. J. Garcia-Luna-Aceves,et al.  Dynamics of distributed shortest-path routing algorithms , 1991, SIGCOMM '91.

[9]  Gary Scott Malkin,et al.  RIP Version 2 , 1998, RFC.

[10]  Daniel Massey,et al.  Improving BGP convergence through consistency assertions , 2002, Proceedings.Twenty-First Annual Joint Conference of the IEEE Computer and Communications Societies.

[11]  S. T. Buckland,et al.  An Introduction to the Bootstrap. , 1994 .

[12]  Jennifer Rexford,et al.  Stable internet routing without global coordination , 2001, TNET.

[13]  Bassam Halabi,et al.  Internet Routing Architectures , 1997 .

[14]  Roger Wattenhofer,et al.  The impact of Internet policy and topology on delayed routing convergence , 2001, Proceedings IEEE INFOCOM 2001. Conference on Computer Communications. Twentieth Annual Joint Conference of the IEEE Computer and Communications Society (Cat. No.01CH37213).

[15]  Gordon T. Wilfong,et al.  A safe path vector protocol , 2000, Proceedings IEEE INFOCOM 2000. Conference on Computer Communications. Nineteenth Annual Joint Conference of the IEEE Computer and Communications Societies (Cat. No.00CH37064).