A SURVEY OF MODELLING BGP ROUTE SELECTION FOR EVALUATING STRUCTURAL CHANGE IN A NETWORK

Abstract

The Internet has quickly evolved into a vast global network owned and operated by thousands of different administrative entities. During this time, it became apparent that vanilla shortest-path routing would be insufficient to handle the myriad operational, economic, and political factors involved in routing. ISPs began to modify routing configurations to support routing policies, i.e. goals held by the router’s owner that controlled which routes were chosen and which routes were propagated to neighbours. The performance of IP networks depends on a wide variety of dynamic conditions. Traffic shifts, equipment failures, planned maintenance, and topology changes in other parts of the Internet can all degrade performance. To maintain good performance, network operators must continually reconfigure the routing protocols. Operators configure BGP to control how traffic flows to neighbouring Autonomous Systems (ASes), as well as how traffic traverses their networks. However, because BGP route selection is distributed, indirectly controlled by configurable policies, and influenced by complex interactions with intradomain routing protocols, operators cannot predict how a particular BGP structure would behave in practice. To avoid inadvertently degrading network performance, operators need to evaluate the effects of structure changes before deploying them on a live network. We propose an algorithm that computes the outcome of the BGP route selection process for each router in a single AS, given only a static snapshot of the network state, without simulating the complex details of BGP message passing.anage them differently. We show that this can be achieved by utilising knowledge bases and new software solutions.