Route flap damping exacerbates internet routing convergence

By Z. Morley Mao, Ramesh Govindan, George Varghese, Randy Howard Katz. Conference on Applications, Technologies, Architectures, and Protocols for Computer Communication, 2002

298 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Route flap damping is considered to be a widely deployed mechanism in core routers that limits the widespread propagation of unstable BGP routing information. Originally designed to suppress route changes caused by link flaps, flap damping attempts to distinguish persistently unstable routes from routes that occasionally fail. It is considered to be a major contributor to the stability of the Internet routing system.We show in this paper that, surprisingly, route flap damping can significantly exacerbate the convergence times of relatively stable routes. For example, a route to a prefix that is withdrawn exactly once and re-announced can be suppressed for up to an hour (using the current RIPE recommended damping parameters). We show that such abnormal behavior fundamentally arises from the interaction of flap damping with BGP path exploration during route withdrawal. We study this interaction using a simple analytical model and understand the impact of various BGP parameters on its occurrence using simulations. Finally, we outline a preliminary proposal to modify route flap damping scheme that removes the undesired interaction in all the topologies we studied. .

Subfields: Artificial Intelligence, Computer Networks and Communications, Hardware and Architecture

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/314765c7259dabccbf72722875e3e7ddd1bc5558

How researchers see this paper

The researchers whose trusted networks rank it highest, strongest advocate first. Every researcher gets a different order.

In Artificial Intelligence

1. Hari Balakrishnan
2. Nick McKeown
3. Arthur W. Berger
4. Jennifer Rexford
5. N. Feamster
6. Z. Morley Mao
7. Blaine Nelson
8. Steven H. Low

In Computer Networks and Communications

1. Jennifer Rexford
2. N. Feamster
3. Nick McKeown
4. Rob Sherwood
5. Brandon Heller
6. Hari Balakrishnan
7. Anja Feldmann
8. Z. Morley Mao

In Hardware and Architecture

1. Jennifer Rexford
2. N. Feamster
3. Hari Balakrishnan
4. Nick McKeown
5. Arthur W. Berger

Citations in the corpus

• The controller placement problem (2012, background): “Availability: Intuition suggests that fully distributed control planes are more resilient to failures than decoupled control planes, but issues of route flapping [17], BGP “wedgies” [10], and protracted route convergence times [11] undermine this belief.”
• The case for separating routing from routers (2004, background): “Unfortunately, sometimes a single failure can trigger many advertisements that can mistakenly activate route flap damping [29].”
• Locating internet routing instabilities (2004, background): “, [2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13, 14, 15, 16, 17], they are still poorly understood.”