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A
REPORT
ON
CS526- Assignment# 4
Amit Jhamb
&
Bhavani Prasad
1
A Report on Current BGP Problems and suggested solutions
BGP Overview
The Border Gateway Protocol (BGP) is an exterior gateway protocol (EGP) also
known as inter-Autonomous System routing protocol. The primary function of a BGP
speaking system is to exchange network reachability information with other BGP
systems. This network reachability information includes information on the list of
Autonomous Systems (ASs) that reachability information traverses. This information
is sufficient to construct a graph of AS connectivity from which routing loops may be
pruned and some policy decisions at the AS level may be enforced. BGP-4 provides a
new set of mechanisms for supporting classless interdomain routing. These
mechanisms include support for advertising an IP prefix and eliminate the concept of
network "class" within BGP. BGP-4 also introduces mechanisms, which allow
aggregation of routes, including aggregation of AS paths. BGP also performs
interdomain routing in TCP/IP networks.
Problems in BGP
All BGP speakers within a single AS must be fully meshed so that any external
routing information must be re-distributed to all other routers within that AS. This
"full mesh" requirement clearly does not scale when there are a large number of
IBGP speakers as is common in many of todays internet networks. For n BGP
speakers within an AS you must maintain n*(n-1)/2 unique IBGP sessions. This
large number of connections makes resource intensive authentication and encryption
a practical impossibility, and further leads to slow BGP convergence.
Here we provide an overview of the three possible solutions for the I-BGP scalability
problem-
2
A Report on Current BGP Problems and suggested solutions
A Route Flap may be described as constant up and down of a link. A widely deployed
BGP implementation may tend to fail due to high routing update volume of the
advertised reachability of a subset of Internet prefixes. Two methods of controlling
the frequency of route advertisement are described here. The first method involves
fixed timers. The fixed timer technique has no space overhead per route but has
the disadvantage of slowing route convergence for the normal case where a route
does not have a history of instability. The second method overcomes this limitation
at the expense of maintaining some additional space overhead. The additional
overhead includes a small amount of state per route and a very small processing
overhead.
The longest prefix match routing technique introduced by CIDR and implemented in
BGP when combined with provider address allocation is an obstacle to effective
multi-homing where load sharing across the multiple links is required: If an AS has
been allocated its addresses from an upstream provider, the upstream provider can
aggregate those addresses with those of other customers and need only advertise a
single prefix for a range of customers. But if the customer AS is also connected to
another provider, the second provider is not able to aggregate the customer
addresses because they are not taken from his allocation, and will therefore have to
announce a more specific route to the customer AS. The longest match rule will then
direct all traffic through the second provider. Small networks multi-homing with a
number of peers and a number of upstream providers has lead to an enormous
growth of the BGP tables[5].
3
A Report on Current BGP Problems and suggested solutions
The visibility may be partial and inconsistent depending on the location (and
function) of the router in the AS. In certain topologies involving either route
reflectors or confederations, the partial visibility of the available exit points into a
neighboring AS may result in an inconsistent best path selection decision as the
routers don't have all the relevant information. If the inconsistencies span more
than one peering router, they may result in a persistent route oscillation.
Policy management is extremely complex and mostly done without the aid of any
automated procedure. The extreme complexity means that highly qualified
specialists are required for policy management of border routers.
Configuration Problems:
When a new BGP peer is added, every other peer in the network must be
reconfigured with the new peers ID and the new peer must be configured with the
Ids of all existing peers a tedious, error-prone task that contributes to unreliability
BGP security:
4
A Report on Current BGP Problems and suggested solutions
Multiprotocol Extensions:
Table Growth:
5
A Report on Current BGP Problems and suggested solutions
Projections of the average prefix length of advertisements using current trends in the
number of BGP table entries and the total address span advertised in the BGP table
indicate lookups need to search deeper through the prefix chain to find the necessary
forwarding entry, requiring faster memory subsystems to perform each lookup, or
the lookup table needs to be both larger and more sparsely populated, increasing the
requirements for high speed memory within the routers forwarding subsystem [13].
BGP Convergence:
Routing policy conflicts with BGP has a possibility of leading the protocol to diverge.
That is, such inconsistencies could cause a collection of ASes to exchange BGP
routing messages indefinitely without ever converging on a set of stable routes.
While pure distance-vector protocols such as RIP [8] are guaranteed to converge,
the same is not true for BGP. Indeed, results were shown that there are routing
policies that can cause BGP to diverge. BGP divergence could introduce a large
amount of instability into the global routing system. However, it is difficult to find
any instance where routing instability has been caused by protocol divergence, and it
is impossible to say if divergent BGP systems will arise in practice. On the other
hand, given the economic importance of the Internet, it is believe that it is
worthwhile to consider worst-case scenarios and to provide safeguards where
possible.
A static solution is one that relies on programs to analyze routing policies to verify
that they do not contain policy conflicts that could lead to protocol divergence [16]
AS Number Exhaustion:
Each network that is multi-homed within the topology of the Internet and wishes to
express a distinct external routing policy must use an AS to associate its advertised
addresses with such a policy. In general, each network is associated with a single
AS, and the number of ASs in the default-free routing table tracks the number of
entities that have unique routing policies. The trend of AS number deployment over
the past four years was found exponential. The growth in the number of AS's can be
correlated with the growth in the amount of address space spanned by the BGP
routing table. Each AS is advertising smaller average address spans per AS. This
points to increasingly finer levels of routing detail being announced into the global
routing domain, a trend that causes some level of concern. If this rate of growth
continues, the 16 bits AS number set were projected to be exhausted by late-2005.
Work is underway within the IETF to modify the BGP protocol to carry AS numbers in
a 32-bit field [13].
6
A Report on Current BGP Problems and suggested solutions
Suggestions
In order to avoid I-BGP full mesh, flooding methodology familiar in OSPF and IS-IS
can be used as a new basis for the new transport method. Some of the issues with
BGP route convergence can be addressed by implementing some kind of message
synchronization in the next version of the protocol. This would help to avoid the
back-and-forth rounds of update information exchanged after a route failure and
limit exchanges to one round. Since the size of the routing table is of great concern,
filters can be placed to drop the routes that are too host specific. These filters are
expressed as a function of the length of the address prefix, such the network that is
smaller than a /24 is not accepted. The actual limit may vary from network to
network, and also over time.
References
[1]. BGP Route Reflection- An alternative to full mesh IBGP (RFC 1966)
[2]. Autonomous System Confederations for BGP (INTERNET DRAFT) - draft-ietf-idr-
bgp-confed-rfc1965bis-01.txt
[3]. A BGP/IDRP Route Server alternative to a full mesh routing (RFC 1863)
[4]. BGP Route Flap Damping (RFC 2439)
[5]. Analysis of Current Inter-domain routing policies - Young Jiang, Telia Research
[6]. Border Gateway Protocol (BGP) Persistent Route Oscillation Condition (RFC
3345)
[7]. BGP Scalability and Troubleshooting - Cisco.com
[8]. BGP persistent route oscillation solution - draft-walton-bgp-route-oscillation-
stop-00
[9]. BST Protocol - BGP Scalable Transport, Packet Design
[10]. BGP Security Vulnerability Analysis (INTERNET DRAFT) - draft-murphy-bgp-vul-
01.txt- Sandra Murphy, NAI Labs
[11]. Multiprotocol Extensions for BGP-4 (RFC 2283)
[12]. http://www.research.att.com/~griffin/bgpresearch.html Timothy G. Griffin,
AT&T labs
[13]. Analyzing the Internets BGP Routing Table http://macross.dynodns.net/idr/4-
1-bgp.pdf
[14]. On Characterizing BGP Routing Table Growth
http://www-unix.ecs.umass.edu/~lgao/globalinternet2002_tian.pdf
[15]. BGP Communities Attribute (RFC 1997)
[16]. An Analysis of BGP Convergence Properties - Timothy G. Griffin and Gordon
Wilfong- Bell Laboratories, Lucent Technologies