Quantifying the Propagation Behavior of BGP Routing Update

Abstract

Inter-domain routing convergence is the state of a set of routers that have the same topological information about the internetwork in which they operate. Previous measurement studies about inter-domain routing convergence are carried out through the analysis of BGP update traffic. However, this kind of studies only consider the time that inter-domain routers take to reach a consistent view of the network topology after internet path failure, failover and repair. There has been no study to quantify the time that inter-domain routers take to distribute a routing update across the network.
In this paper we develop a system to measure the propagation behavior of BGP route updates, including both passive data collection and active data probe in the real world. This system has been continuously monitoring the Internet for more than three years. During this period, 143K route updates were detected, and 5172k detection were triggered. Our data shows that route oscillations that have only been theoretically studied before do exist in the Internet. Inter-domain routers take about 30 seconds to distribute a routing update across the network.