On Update Rate-Limiting in BGP

In order to reduce the number of BGP updates that routers need to process, it is common to rate-limit such updates using a timer that specifies the minimum time between two consecutive updates for a given destination prefix. Rate-limiting plays an important role in determining the number of routing updates that are generated after a routing event, and the time it takes before the network converges to a new stable state. Still, there are few guidelines for how rate-limiting timers should be configured in order to achieve the desired convergence properties. This work takes a first step in this direction, by exploring how different rate-limiting implementations and configurations affect the resulting churn level in a live BGP session. Measurements are performed on multiple parallel BGP sessions to a stub AS, configured with and without rate-limiting timers. We find that the daily rate of updates is reduced by two thirds when configuring the timer to the default value recommended by BGP standards. We further investigate different rate-limiting implementations and configurations using the measured BGP update patterns on emulated BGP sessions, and find that increasing the rate-limiting timer gives a logarithmic decrease in churn. Finally, using BGP update traces from RouteViews, we present the first empirical model that quantifies the impact of rate-limiting in terms of churn reduction given the observed arrival pattern of BGP updates.