An Empirical Study of Router Response to Large BGP Routing Table Load

Chang, Di-Fa and Govindan, Ramesh and Heidemann, John
USC/Information Sciences Institute

citation

Di-Fa Chang, Ramesh Govindan and John Heidemann 2001. An Empirical Study of Router Response to Large BGP Routing Table Load. Technical Report ISI-TR-2001-552. USC/Information Sciences Institute. [PDF]

abstract

Anecdotal evidence suggests that misconfiguration of backbone routers occasionally leads to an injection of large routing tables into the BGP routing system. In this paper, we investigate the detailed mechanics of router response to large BGP routing tables. We examine three commercial grade routers, and find that their responses vary significantly. Some routers exhibit table-size oscillations that have the potential to cause cascading failure. Others need operator intervention to recover from large routing tables. We also find that deployed resource control mechanisms, such as prefix limits and route flap damping, are only partially successful in mitigating the impact of large routing tables.

reference

@techreport{Chang01a,
  author = {Chang, Di-Fa and Govindan, Ramesh and Heidemann, John},
  title = {An Empirical Study of Router Response to
                           Large BGP Routing Table Load},
  institution = {USC/Information Sciences Institute},
  year = {2001},
  sortdate = {2001-12-01},
  project = {ant, saman, conser},
  jsubject = {routing},
  number = {ISI-TR-2001-552},
  month = dec,
  jlocation = {johnh: pafile},
  keywords = {cisco juniper failure to bgp routing loads},
  otherurl = {https://ant.isi.edu/%7edifac/techreport.ps.gz},
  url = {https://ant.isi.edu/%7ejohnh/PAPERS/Chang01a.html},
  psurl = {https://ant.isi.edu/%7ejohnh/PAPERS/Chang01a.ps.gz},
  pdfurl = {https://ant.isi.edu/%7ejohnh/PAPERS/Chang01a.pdf},
  myorganization = {USC/Information Sciences Institute}
}