On constructing correct and scalable iBGP configurations

BGP (Border Gateway Protocol), the Internet's current inter-domain routing protocol, has two modes of operation: eBGP (external BGP, used to exchange routing information between autonomous systems (ASes)), and iBGP (internal BGP, used to propagate that information about external destinations to other BGP routers within an AS). Full-mesh iBGP and iBGP with route reflection are the two most common methods of configuring iBGP. Although a full-mesh iBGP guarantees correct and predictable routing, it requires a large number of iBGP sessions-approximately quadratic in the number of BGP routers. Such configurations do not scale well in the number of BGP routers in the AS because of the memory, bandwidth and CPU overhead involved in exchanging routes over a large number of iBGP sessions at each router. Hence configurations based on route reflectors are commonly used for intra-AS route dissemination in large ASes. However, researchers have found that configuring route reflectors in an unprincipled fashion can result in routing anomalies like forwarding loops and sub-optimal paths. Although previous work on iBGP configuration correctness gives sufficient conditions to check if a given iBGP configuration is correct, the problem of constructing correct and scalable iBGP configurations using route reflection has not received much attention.

Department dc:contributor.department

Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Dept. of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science.

Grantor dc:publisher

Massachusetts Institute of Technology

Year dc:date.issued

2006

Author dc:creator

• Vutukuru, Mythili

Advisor dc:contributor.advisor

• Hari Balakrishnan.

• Electrical Engineering and Computer Science.

Statement dc:rights

• M.I.T. theses are protected by copyright. They may be viewed from this source for any purpose, but reproduction or distribution in any format is prohibited without written permission. See provided URL for inquiries about permission.

Licence dc:rights.uri

• http://dspace.mit.edu/handle/1721.1/7582

Language dc:language.iso

eng

Handle dc:identifier.uri

http://hdl.handle.net/1721.1/38324

OAI identifier oai:identifier

oai:dspace.mit.edu:1721.1/38324