BGP beacons

ABSTRACT

The desire to better understand global BGP dynamics has motivated several studies using active measurement techniques, which inject announcements and withdrawals of prefixes from the global routing domain. From these one can measure quantities such as the BGP convergence time. Previously, the route injection infrastructure of such experiments has either been temporary in nature, or its use has been restricted to the experimenters. The routing research community would benefit from a permanent and public infrastructure for such active probes. We use the term BGP Beacon to refer to a publicly documented prefix having global visibility and a published schedule for announcements and withdrawals. A BGP Beacon is to be used for the ongoing study of BGP dynamics, and so should be supportedwith a long-term commitment. We describe several BGP Beacons thathave been set up at various points in the Internet. We then describe techniques for processing BGP updates when a BGP Beacon is observed from a BGP monitoring point such as Oregon's Route Views. Finally, we illustrate the use of BGP Beacons in the analysis of convergence delays, route flap damping, and update inter-arrival times.

REFERENCES

• 1: Y. Rekhter and T. Li, "A Border Gateway Protocol," RFC 1771 (BGP version 4), March 1995.
• 2: Sam Halabi , Danny McPherson, Internet Routing Architectures, Second Edition, Cisco Systems, 2000
• 3: Christian Huitema, Routing in the Internet (2nd ed.), Prentice Hall PTR, Upper Saddle River, NJ, 1999
• 4: Craig Labovitz , G. Robert Malan , Farnam Jahanian, Internet routing instability, Proceedings of the ACM SIGCOMM '97 conference on Applications, technologies, architectures, and protocols for computer communication, p.115-126, September 14-18, 1997, Cannes, France
• 5: C. Labovitz, R. Malan, and F. Jahanian, "Origins of Internet Routing Instability," in Proceedings of INFOCOM 1999.
• 6: Craig Labovitz , Abha Ahuja , Farnam Jahanian, Experimental Study of Internet Stability and Backbone Failures, Proceedings of the Twenty-Ninth Annual International Symposium on Fault-Tolerant Computing, p.278, June 15-18, 1999
• 7: "University of Oregon Route Views Archive Project," www.routeviews.org.
• 8: Ripe NCC, "Routing Information Service Raw Data," .
• 9: Craig Labovitz , Abha Ahuja , Abhijit Bose , Farnam Jahanian, Delayed Internet routing convergence, Proceedings of the conference on Applications, Technologies, Architectures, and Protocols for Computer Communication, p.175-187, August 28-September 01, 2000, Stockholm, Sweden
• 10: C. Labovitz, R. Wattenhofer, S. Venkatachary, and A. Ahuja, "The Impact of Internet Policy and Topology on Delayed Routing Convergence," in Proceedings of INFOCOM 2001.
• 11: C. Villamizar, R. Chandra, and R. Govindan, "BGP Route Flap Damping," RFC 2439, 1998.
• 12: Zhuoqing Morley Mao , Ramesh Govindan , George Varghese , Randy H. Katz, Route flap damping exacerbates internet routing convergence, Proceedings of the 2002 conference on Applications, technologies, architectures, and protocols for computer communications, August 19-23, 2002, Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, USA
• 13: "PSG BGP Beacons," http://www.psg.com/~zmao/BGPBeacon.html.
• 14: "RIPE BGP Beacons," http://www.ripe.net/ris/beacon.html.
• 15: Tim Griffin, "What is the sound of one route flapping?," Network Modeling and Simulation Summer Workshop at Dartmouth, July 2002.
• 16: Lan Wang , Xiaoliang Zhao , Dan Pei , Randy Bush , Daniel Massey , Allison Mankin , S. Felix Wu , Lixia Zhang, Observation and analysis of BGP behavior under stress, Proceedings of the 2nd ACM SIGCOMM Workshop on Internet measurment, November 06-08, 2002, Marseille, France [doi>10.1145/637201.637231]
• 17: Timothy G. Griffin and Brian J. Premore, "An Experimental Analysis of BGP Convergence Time," in Proceedings of ICNP 2001.
• 18: Pedro~Roque Marques, "BGP route advertisement interval," Talk at RIPE 45 Meetings, available at http://www.ripe.net/ripe/meetings/ripe-45/presentations/.
• 19: Henk Uijterwaal, "Routing Beacons," Available at http://www.potaroo.net/iepg/november2002/, November 2002.

INDEX TERMS

Primary Classification:
  C. Computer Systems Organization
  C.2 COMPUTER-COMMUNICATION NETWORKS
      C.2.2 Network Protocols
          Subjects: Routing protocols

General Terms:
Experimentation, Measurement

Keywords:
border gateway protocol, convergence time, network measurements