research-article

On the scalability of BGP: the roles of topology growth and update rate-limiting

Authors:

Ahmed Elmokashfi,

Amund Kvalbein,

Constantine DovrolisAuthors Info & Claims

CoNEXT '08: Proceedings of the 2008 ACM CoNEXT Conference

Article No.: 8, Pages 1 - 12

https://doi.org/10.1145/1544012.1544020

Published: 09 December 2008 Publication History

Abstract

The scalability of BGP routing is a major concern for the Internet community. Scalability is an issue in two different aspects: increasing routing table size, and increasing rate of BGP updates. In this paper, we focus on the latter. Our objective is to characterize the churn increase experienced by ASes in different levels of the Internet hierarchy as the network grows. We look at several "what-if" growth scenarios that are either plausible directions in the evolution of the Internet or educational corner cases, and investigate their scalability implications. In addition, we examine the effect of the BGP update rate-limiting timer (MRAI), considering both major variations with which it has been deployed. Our findings explain the dramatically different impact of multi-homing and peering on BGP scalability, identify which topological growth scenarios will lead to faster churn increase, and emphasize the importance of not rate-limiting explicit withdrawals (despite what RFC-4271 recently required).

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Published In

cover image ACM Conferences

CoNEXT '08: Proceedings of the 2008 ACM CoNEXT Conference

December 2008

526 pages

ISBN:9781605582108

DOI:10.1145/1544012

Conference Chairs:
Arturo Azcorra
IMDEA Networks and University Carlos III of Madrid, Spain
,
Gustavo de Veciana
University Texas at Austin
,
Program Chairs:
Keith W. Ross
Polytechnic University
,
Leandros Tassiulas
University of Thessaly, Greece

Copyright © 2008 ACM.

Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for components of this work owned by others than ACM must be honored. Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, or republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. Request permissions from [email protected]

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Published: 09 December 2008

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https://doi.org/10.1364/JOCN.547074
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