Stabilizing inter-domain routing in the internet

Abstract

This paper reports the first self-stabilizing Border Gateway Protocol (BGP). BGP is an inter-domain routing protocol. Self-stabilization is a technique to tolerate arbitrary transient faults. The purpose of self-stabilizing BGP is to solve the routing instability problem. The routing instability in the Internet can occur due to errors in configuring the routing data structures, transient physical and data link problems, software bugs, and memory corruption. This instability can increase the network latency, slow down the convergence of the routing data structures, and can also cause the partitioning of networks. The self-stabilizing BGP presented here provides a way to detect and automatically recover from this kind of faults.