Preventing the Unnecessary Propagation of BGP Withdraws

  • Authors:
  • Virginie Schrieck;Pierre Francois;Cristel Pelsser;Olivier Bonaventure

  • Affiliations:
  • CSE Dept, Universite catholique de Louvain (UCL), Louvain-la-Neuve, Belgium 1348;CSE Dept, Universite catholique de Louvain (UCL), Louvain-la-Neuve, Belgium 1348;NTT Network Service Systems Laboratories, NTT Corporation, Tokyo, Japan 180-8585;CSE Dept, Universite catholique de Louvain (UCL), Louvain-la-Neuve, Belgium 1348

  • Venue:
  • NETWORKING '09 Proceedings of the 8th International IFIP-TC 6 Networking Conference
  • Year:
  • 2009

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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.