An embedded solution to IBGP oscillations

The occurrence of oscillations in the border gateway protocol (BGP [Rekhter, Y et al., 1995]) has been discussed in many papers. Autonomous system (AS) configurations using route reflection [Bates, T et al., 2000] are considered to be especially sensitive to oscillations ([Mc Pherson et al., 2002], [Griffin, T et al., 2002] and [Basu, A et al., 2002]). Moreover, such configurations are commonly used by the transit ASes where oscillations may have a significant impact on BGP stability and on associated traffic. This paper proposes a novel approach to avoid instability due to oscillations. It presents a lightweight embedded module added to route reflector(s) that detects internal BGP (IBGP) oscillations and provides assistance to solve them. This article gives motivation, architecture and experimentation results with the embedded module.