Achieving fast BGP reroute with traffic engineering using multiple routing planes

Abstract

In today's BGP routing architecture, traffic delivery is in general based on single path selection paradigms. The lack of path diversity hinders the support for resilience, traffic engineering and QoS provisioning across the Internet. Some recently proposed multi-plane extensions to BGP offer a promising mechanism to enable diverse inter-domain routes towards destination prefixes. Based on these enhanced BGP protocols, we propose in this paper a novel technique to enable controlled fast egress router switching for handling network failures. In order to minimize the disruptions to real-time services caused by the failures, backup egress routers can be immediately activated through locally remarking affected traffic towards alternative routing planes without waiting for IGP routing re-convergence. According to our evaluation results, the proposed multi-plane based egress router selection algorithm is able to provide both high path diversity and balanced load distribution across inter-domain links with a small number of planes. © 2008 Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg.