OFBGP: A Scalable, Highly Available BGP Architecture for SDN

Software-Defined Networking (SDN), enabled by OpenFlow, represents a paradigm shift from traditional network to the future Internet. Compared with traditional networks, its controllers and network applications have higher requirements on the availability and scalability. This paper proposes OFBGP, a new scalable, highly available architecture of BGP totally based on distributed design, without any centralized component. OFBGP is an application of SDN controller. In the design of OFBGP, BGP functionalities are divided according to their characteristics and requirements into two modules: BGP Protocol and BGP Decision. By doing so, the application can easily scale out when the number of BGP neighbors increases, and the process of BGP routing decisions can be parallelized. The paper also presents a new solution to implement BGP NSR through snapshots and backup event flow so that from a historical snapshot, replaying real-time backup event flow can rebuild the state that has happened behind at any moment. When a fault occurs, we can easily restore a state to ensure BGP neighbors do not perceive failure. We have also built a prototype to demonstrate our architecture. After the test of the performance of some core modules, the result shows that our new architecture can help improve the availability and scalability of BGP.