TIDR

This thesis develops and studies a traffic-aware inter-domain routing (TIDR) protocol, which drastically improves the convergence and stability of the BGP-based inter-domain routing system. TIDR is designed based on two important Internet properties—the Internet access locality and the prevalence of transient failures. In TIDR, a network prefix is classified at an AS as either significant or insignificant from the viewpoint of a neighboring AS, depending on the amount of traffic exchanged between the prefix and the neighbor (including transit traffic). While BGP updates of significant prefixes are propagated with a higher priority, the propagation of updates of insignificant prefixes is aggressively slowed down. In particular, TIDR tries to localize the effect of transient failures on insignificant prefixes instead of propagating it onto the whole Internet. Importantly, TIDR will not create traffic black-holes due to the localization of transient failures. In this thesis we present the design of TIDR and perform simulation experiments to study the performance of TIDR. Using network topologies derived from real BGP routing tables, we show that TIDR can greatly improve both the convergence and stability of BGP. For example, compared with BGP, TIDR reduces the average number of updates by 77% to 94%, and reduces the average convergence time by 92% to 98% following a network failure event. TIDR also outperforms other existing schemes including Ghost Flushing, BGP-RCN, and EPIC. As a by product of our performance studies, we also, for the first time, formally confirm that Ghost Flushing may exacerbate both the convergence and stability situation of BGP for network fail-over events.