Self-stabilizing Border Gateway Protocol

Abstract

The Border Gateway Protocol (BGP) is currently the only inter-domain routing protocol employed on the Internet. It is designed to exchange the reachability information among the autonomous systems in the global Internet. The Internet routing instability (or the rapid fluctuation of the network reachability information) is an important problem facing the Internet engineering community. With the wide availability of the Internet, the Internet failures may not only interrupt the daily routines of countless end-users, but also generate millions of dollars of loss in e-commerce. Since BGP has an impact on routing in the global Internet, the design and implementation of a robust and fault-tolerant Border Gateway Protocol is an important research topic; We achieve the fault-tolerance of BGP using the paradigm of self-stabilization. A self-stabilizing protocol, starting from an arbitrary state converges, within finite steps, to a state from where the system exhibits the desired behavior. In this thesis, we propose a self-stabilizing Border Gateway Protocol. Our design consists of mainly two phases: First, we investigate the Interior Gateway Protocols (IGP) which runs under the BGP. We design a self-stabilizing IGP. Because IGP provides the routing information inside an autonomous system, its stability is a crucial aspect of stabilization of the BGP. Then, we design a self-stabilizing BGP