On Understanding Transient Interdomain Routing Failures

The convergence time of the interdomain routing protocol, BGP, can last as long as 30 minutes. Yet, routing behavior during BGP route convergence is poorly understood. During route convergence, an end-to-end Internet path can experience a transient loss of reachability. We refer to this loss of reachability as transient routing failure. Transient routing failures can lead to packet losses, and prolonged packet loss bursts can make the performance of applications such as Voice-over-IP and interactive games unacceptable. In this paper, we study how routing failures can occur in the Internet. With the aid of a formal model that captures transient failures of the interdomain routing protocol, we derive the sufficient conditions that transient routing failures could occur. We further study transient routing failures in typical BGP systems where commonly used routing policies are applied. Network administrators can apply our analysis to improve their network performance and stability.