How to construct a correct and scalable iBGP configuration

Mythili Vutukuru, Paul Valiant, Swastik Kopparty, Hari Balakrishnan

Research output: Chapter in Book/Report/Conference proceedingConference contribution

34 Scopus citations

Abstract

The Internet's current interdomain routing protocol, BGP (Border Gateway Protocol), has two modes of operation: eBGP (external BGP), used to exchange routing information between autonomous systems, and iBGP (internal BGP), used to propagate that information within an autonomous system (AS). In a "full mesh" iBGP configuration, every router has a BGP session with every border router in the AS. Because a full mesh configuration has a large number of iBGP sessions and does not scale well, configurations based on route reflectors are commonly used for intra-AS route dissemination [2]. Unfortunately, route reflector configurations violate important correctness properties [12], including loop-free forwarding and complete visibility to all eBGP-learned best routes, especially in the face of router and link failures. This paper presents and analyzes the first (to our knowledge) algorithm, BGPSep, to construct an iBGP session configuration that is both correct and more scalable than a full mesh. BGPSep uses the notion of a graph separator - a small set of nodes whose removal partitions a graph into connected components of roughly equal sizes-to choose route reflectors and iBGP sessions in a way that guarantees correctness. We evaluate an implementation of the BGPSep algorithm on several real-world and simulated network topologies and find that iBGP configurations generated by BGPSep have between 2.5 to 5× fewer iBGP sessions than a full mesh.

Original languageEnglish (US)
Title of host publicationProceedings - INFOCOM 2006
Subtitle of host publication25th IEEE International Conference on Computer Communications
DOIs
StatePublished - 2006
Externally publishedYes
EventINFOCOM 2006: 25th IEEE International Conference on Computer Communications - Barcelona, Spain
Duration: Apr 23 2006Apr 29 2006

Publication series

NameProceedings - IEEE INFOCOM
ISSN (Print)0743-166X

Other

OtherINFOCOM 2006: 25th IEEE International Conference on Computer Communications
Country/TerritorySpain
CityBarcelona
Period4/23/064/29/06

All Science Journal Classification (ASJC) codes

  • Computer Science(all)
  • Electrical and Electronic Engineering

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