Traffic-Aware Inter-Domain Routing for Improved Internet Routing Stability

This paper develops and studies a traffic-aware inter-domain routing (TIDR) protocol, which drastically improves the stability of the BGP-based inter-domain routing system. TIDR is designed based on two important Internet properties-the Internet access non-uniformity and the prevalence of transient failures. In TIDR, a network prefix is classified at an AS as either significant or insignificant from the viewpoint of a neighboring AS, depending on the amount of traffic exchanged between the prefix and the neighbor (including transit traffic). While BGP updates of significant prefixes are propagated with a higher priority, the propagation of updates of insignificant prefixes is aggressively slowed down. In particular, TIDR tries to localize the effect of transient failures on insignificant prefixes instead of propagating it onto the whole Internet. Importantly, TIDR will not create traffic black-holes due to the localization of transient failures. In this paper we present the design of TIDR and perform simulation experiments to study the performance of TIDR. Our simulation results show that TIDR can greatly improve the stability of BGP and also outperforms other existing schemes including Ghost Flushing and EPIC.