An Empirical Study of Router Response to Large BGP Routing Table Load

Di-Fa Chang, Ramesh Govindan, and John Heidemann
USC/Information Sciences Institute

Abstract

Anecdotal evidence suggests that misconfiguration of backbone routers occasionally leads to an injection of large routing tables into the BGP routing system. In this paper, we investigate the detailed mechanics of router response to large BGP routing tables. We examine three commercial grade routers, and find that their responses vary significantly. Some routers exhibit table-size oscillations that have the potential to cause cascading failure. Others need operator intervention to recover from large routing tables. We also find that deployed resource control mechanisms, such as prefix limits and route flap damping, are only partially successful in mitigating the impact of large routing tables.

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Reference

Chang02a: Di-Fa Chang, Ramesh Govindan, and John Heidemann. An Empirical Study of Router Response to Large BGP Routing Table Load. In Proceedings of the ACM SIGCOMM Internet Measurement Workshop, pp. 203-208. Marseille, France, USC/Information Sciences Institute, ACM. November, 2002. <http://www.isi.edu/~johnh/PAPERS/Chang02a.html>.

@inproceedings{Chang02a,
	author = "Di-Fa Chang and Ramesh Govindan and John Heidemann",
	title = "An Empirical Study of Router Response to
                         Large {BGP} Routing Table Load",
	booktitle = "Proceedings of the ACM SIGCOMM Internet Measurement Workshop",
	year = "2002",
	publisher = "{ACM}",
	address = "Marseille, France",
	month = "November",
	pages = "203--208",
	otherurl = "http://www.isi.edu/~difac/imw-2002.ps.gz",
	url = "http://www.isi.edu/~johnh/PAPERS/Chang02a.html",
	psurl = "http://www.isi.edu/~johnh/PAPERS/Chang02a.ps.gz",
	pdfurl = "http://www.isi.edu/~johnh/PAPERS/Chang02a.pdf",
	organization = "USC/Information Sciences Institute",
	copyright = "
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}

Copyright

This paper is copyright © 2002 by its authors. Permission to make digital or hard copies of part or all of this work for personal use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that new copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Abstracting with credit is permitted.

To copy otherwise, to republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission of the authors.