Preventing the Unnecessary Propagation of BGP Withdraws

Abstract

Due to the way BGP paths are distributed over iBGP sessions inside an Autonomous System (AS), a BGP withdraw that follows a failure may be propagated outside the AS although other routers of the AS know a valid alternate path. This causes transient losses of connectivity and contributes to the propagation of a large number of unnecessary BGP messages. In this paper, we show, based on RouteViews data, that a significant number of BGP withdraws are propagated even though alternate paths exists in another border router of the same AS. We propose an incrementally deployable solution based on BGP communities that allows the BGP routers of an AS to suspend the propagation of BGP withdraws when an alternate path is available at the borders of their AS.

Publication
Proceedings of the 8th International IFIP-TC 6 Networking Conference
Cristel Pelsser
Cristel Pelsser
Critical embedded systems, Computer networking, Researcher, Professor

The focus of my research is on network operations, routing, Internet measurements, protocols and security.