Scaling Inter-domain Routing System via Path Exploration Aggregation

One of the most important scalability issues facing the current Internet is the rapidly increasing rate of BGP updates (BGP churn), to which route flap and path exploration are the two major contributors. Current countermeasures would either cause severe reachability loss or delay BGP convergence, and are becoming less attractive for the rising concern about routing convergence as the prevalence of Internet-based real time applications. Based on the observation that highly active prefixes usually repeatedly explore very few as-paths during path exploration, we propose a router-level mechanism, Path Exploration Aggregation (PEA), to scale BGP without either causing prefix unreachable or slowing routing convergence. PEA performs aggregation on the transient paths explored by a highly active prefix, and propagates the aggregated path instead to reduce the updates caused by as-path changes. Moreover, in order to avoid the use of unstable routes, PEA purposely prolongs the aggregated path via as-path prepending to make it less preferred in the perspective of downstream routers. With the BGP traces obtained from RouteViews and RIPE-RIS projects, PEA can reduce BGP updates by up to 63.1%, shorten path exploration duration by up to 53.3%, and accelerate the convergence 7.39 seconds on average per routing event.