Improving BGP convergence with Fed4FIRE+ experiments

The Border Gateway Protocol (BGP) is the single routing protocol that glues the Internet together. Its performance, especially the convergence speed after path changes, is key to global efficiency, also in light of the fact that the number of Autonomous Systems (ASes) and Subnets has reached a level that makes path changes a frequent event. This work presents a testbed-based experimental analysis of BGP convergence time under different hypothesis of Minimum Route Advertisement Interval (MRAI) setting and a proposal to improve it by setting MRAI based on the topological position of the ASes. MRAI is a timer that regulates the frequency of successive UPDATE messages sent by a BGPs router for a given route and destination. The work is based on the modifications of the BIRD BGP daemon and shows that it is possible to execute experiments on testbeds with topologies that have Internet-like characteristics scaling up to thousands of ASes.