Anti-loop probing: achieving fast BGP convergence

BGP may take a long "path exploration" process to converge when a single failure occurs. In this paper, we propose a simple novel mechanism, named anti-loop probing (ALP), to achieve fast BGP convergence. ALP greatly speeds up the "path exploration" process by slightly modifying BGP rules of when to send withdrawals and when to send announcements. Our simulation shows that ALP can achieve a dramatic improvement in BGP convergence and can be implemented with a little memory overhead.