— Internet routers today can be overwhelmed by a large number of BGP updates triggered by events such as session resets, link failures, and policy changes. Such excessive updates can delay routing convergence, which, in turn, degrades the performance of delay- and jitter-sensitive applications. This paper proposes a simple and novel idea of differentiated processing of BGP updates to reduce routers’ load and improve routing convergence without changing the protocol semantics. Based on a set of criteria, BGP updates are grouped into different priority classes. Higher-priority updates are processed and propagated sooner, while lower-priority ones, not affecting routing decisions, can be delayed to both reduce routers’ load and improve routing convergence. We first present a general methodology for update classification, update processing, and priority-state inference. By analyzing real BGP data obtained from Route Views, we show that our update classification is feasible and ben...
Wei Sun, Zhuoqing Morley Mao, Kang G. Shin