Reducing the BGP convergence time through different algorithms

Abstract

One of the many notable qualities of the Internet is its evolution from the interconnection of a small number of independent networks to its current size. Border gateway protocol (BGP) is the only routing protocol between different networks on the Internet. The programmable and open nature of BGP routing policies provides an adaptable protocol. However, the down side of this flexibility is that there are no limits on BGP convergence time. The overall aim of the study is to introduce a mechanism that could balance a reduction in BGP convergence time together with handling the number of BGP messages exchanged during convergence. In this thesis architectural designs as well as a simulation model for Fight, Flight, or Freeze BGP (FFF BGP) are initiated. One delay cause employed was a timer called the Minimum Route Advertisement Interval (MRAI), which is a built-in mechanism. It was set to 30 seconds, forcing the BGP routers to wait at least this time before sending advertisements for the same prefixes. Therefore, an optimum value for the MRAI timer was proposed, which improves the convergence process and does not harm the scalability. The second built-in mechanism, Route Flap Damping (RFD) is designed to detect and suppress flapping or insatiable routes. RFD severely penalises some sites for being well connected because of the high number of update messages exchanged by these sites, which results in operators disabling RFD. A new half-life was proposed to increase the stability and encourge operators to enable the RFD. An FFF BGP mechanism was used to speed up the process in the case of reachability information changes. This mechanism updates the KEEPALIVE message timer to detect any change within the reachability information faster and to deal with it, inspired by the FFF response mechanism. The two built-in mechanisms (MRAI and RFD) used with this proposed paradigm are the edited mechanisms based on this thesis. Experimental results demonstrate the advantage of the FFF BGP mechanism performance. It effectively achieved less than 60% of the present convergence time, and the throughput and traffic were not affected negatively. Therefore, it is recommended that the FFF BGP be deployed in real life.