Understanding slow BGP routing table transfers

Houidi, Zied Ben; Meulle, Mickaël; Teixeira, Renata

doi:10.1145/1644893.1644935

Cited by 14 publications

(15 citation statements)

References 7 publications

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“…Houidi et al [10] investigate the slow table transfer problem. They observed that the sender regularly stops sending routes to the receiver and creates gaps in the table transfer in a VPN provider backbone.…”

Section: B Detecting Bgp Transport Problemsmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Typically neighboring BGP routers are connected by high speed lines, and thus, the BGP routing update exchanges are expected to be very fast in general. However, both the research and operation communities have reported alarmingly long delays (i.e., up to tens of minutes) in BGP table transfers, the particular massive BGP updates triggered by BGP session resets [8,10,24,25,28]. It remains unclear, given only the BGP level information, what causes these slow table transfers or how to fix them.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Zhang et al [31] demonstrate that, even without network congestion, the durations of BGP table transfers may take up to an hour under specific low-rate TCP DoS attacks. By investigating TCP packet traces, Houidi et al [10] report an undocumented BGP timer-driven implementation, which potentially accounts for more than 90% of table transfer time. While these previous works help explain slow BGP data transfers in their particular settings, and highlight opportunities to reveal BGP problems by studying the TCP behavior, there still remain open issues about their prevalence and impact on today's BGP operations.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

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Explaining BGP Slow Table Transfers

Cheng

Park

Patel

et al. 2012

2012 IEEE 32nd International Conference on Distributed Computing Systems

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Abstract-Although there have been a plethora of studies on TCP performance in supporting of various applications, relatively little is known about the interaction between TCP and BGP, which is a specific application running on top of TCP. This paper investigates BGP's slow route propagation by analyzing packet traces collected from a large ISP and RouteViews Oregon collector. In particular we focus on the prolonged periods of BGP routing table transfers and examine in detail the interplay between TCP and BGP. In addition to the problems reported in previous literature, our study reveals a number of new TCP transport problems, that collectively induce significant delays. Furthermore, we develop a tool, named T-DAT, that can be deployed together with BGP data collectors to infer various factors behind the observed delay, including BGP's sending and receiving behavior, TCP's parameter settings, TCP's flow and congestion control, and network path limitation. Identifying these delay contributing factors makes an important step for ISPs and router vendors to diagnose and improve the BGP performance.

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Section: B Detecting Bgp Transport Problemsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

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Explaining BGP Slow Table Transfers

Cheng

Park

Patel

et al. 2012

2012 IEEE 32nd International Conference on Distributed Computing Systems

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“…We have calculated and found that the table transfer time is not significantly correlated with the routing table size, which indicates that the link bandwidth is not the limiting factor. As Houidi et al [11] has discovered, slow table transfers are largely caused by router's timer-driven processing in sending BGP updates.…”

Section: Characteristics Of Session Re-setsmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Most recently [11] Houidi et al found that, for routers from three paricular vendors, the long table transfer durations are caused by routers process timers that regulate the processing of updates, which explains the lack of observed correlation between the routing table size and the transfer time.…”

Section: Related Workmentioning

confidence: 99%

Longitudinal study of BGP monitor session failures

Cheng

Zhao

Zhang

et al. 2010

SIGCOMM Comput. Commun. Rev.

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BGP routing data collected by RouteViews and RIPE RIS have become an essential asset to both the network research and operation communities. However, it has long been speculated that the BGP monitoring sessions between operational routers and the data collectors fail from time to time. Such session failures lead to missing update messages as well as duplicate updates during session re-establishment, making analysis results derived from such data inaccurate. Since there is no complete record of these monitoring session failures, data users either have to sanitize the data discretionarily with respect to their specific needs or, more commonly, assume that session failures are infrequent enough and simply ignore them. In this paper, we present the first systematic assessment and documentary on BGP session failures of RouteViews and RIPE data collectors over the past eight years. Our results show that monitoring session failures are rather frequent, more than 30% of BGP monitoring sessions experienced at least one failure every month. Furthermore, we observed failures that happen to multiple peer sessions on the same collector around the same time, suggesting that the collector's local problems are a major factor in the session instability. We also developed a web site as a community resource to publish all session failures detected for RouteViews and RIPE RIS data collectors to help users select and clean up BGP data before performing their analysis.

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