A Survey on Approaches to Reduce BGP Interdomain Routing Convergence Delay on the Internet

Abstract

The Internet interdomain routing protocol (border gateway protocol) exhibits slow convergence. Many Internet applications suffer from the effects of its high convergence delay. In this paper, we provide an overview of the state-of-the-art methods on efforts to improve interdomain routing performance. We classified these efforts into five kinds of approaches: 1) speeding up updates; 2) limiting path exploration; 3) efficient policy configuration; 4) multipath; and 5) centralized control of the network. We detailed how each approach addresses the slow convergence problem. The goal of this paper is to provide the researchers a deep understanding on what has been done to improve Internet convergence time. We also discuss why, despite the existence of these efforts, the issue remains open.