BGP convergence in military coalition networks

The BGP interdomain routing protocol plays an important role in military coalition and national networks. BGP is used for routing between different autonomous systems or administrative domains and offers a well defined interface between networks. However, the use of local routing policies to control distribution of routing information may cause the network routing to diverge resulting in unstable network operations. The use of common guidelines for configuration of routing policy may prevent divergence problems, but at the cost of loss of connectivity in certain situations, even when communication paths do exist. This is not a favorable situation, since access to communications services is extremely important in military networks and available paths should be accessible.