Instability Free Routing: Beyond One Protocol Instance

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Authors
Le, F.
Zhang, H.
Xie, Geoffrey
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2008-12
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December 2008
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Abstract
Today, a large body of research exists regarding the correctness of routing protocols. However, many reported global disruptions of Internet connectivity, e.g., inter-AS persistent loops, cannot be explained by looking at a single routing protocol at a time. In fact, these anomalies have long been suspected in the operator community to be caused by the interactions between routing protocols. The interactions between protocol instances are governed by two procedures at the border routers: route selection (RS) ranks routes from different protocol instances; and route redistribution (RR) exchanges routes between protocol instances. Prior studies hypothesized that RR may be responsible for a portion of the observed anomalies. In this paper, we provide analytical and experimental results to link RS, RR, and their interplay to anomalies discovered in operational networks. We show that RS by itself can cause route oscillations and loops, and that in all Cisco, Quagga, and XORP implementations, nondeterministic behaviors may occur because of their incorrect modeling of the dependencies between RS and RR. We identify the root cause for each of the instabilities and derive a configuration guideline as well as a functional model to eliminate them.Today, a large body of research exists regarding the correctness of routing protocols. However, many reported global disruptions of Internet connectivity, e.g., inter-AS persistent loops, cannot be explained by looking at a single routing protocol at a time. In fact, these anomalies have long been suspected in the operator community to be caused by the interactions between routing protocols. The interactions between protocol instances are governed by two procedures at the border routers: route selection (RS) ranks routes from different protocol instances; and route redistribution (RR) exchanges routes between protocol instances. Prior studies hypothesized that RR may be responsible for a portion of the observed anomalies. In this paper, we provide analytical and experimental results to link RS, RR, and their interplay to anomalies discovered in operational networks. We show that RS by itself can cause route oscillations and loops, and that in all Cisco, Quagga, and XORP implementations, nondeterministic behaviors may occur because of their incorrect modeling of the dependencies between RS and RR. We identify the root cause for each of the instabilities and derive a configuration guideline as well as a functional model to eliminate them.Today, a large body of research exists regarding the correctness of routing protocols. However, many reported global disruptions of Internet connectivity, e.g., inter-AS persistent loops, cannot be explained by looking at a single routing protocol at a time. In fact, these anomalies have long been suspected in the operator community to be caused by the interactions between routing protocols. The interactions between protocol instances are governed by two procedures at the border routers: route selection (RS) ranks routes from different protocol instances; and route redistribution (RR) exchanges routes between protocol instances. Prior studies hypothesized that RR may be responsible for a portion of the observed anomalies. In this paper, we provide analytical and experimental results to link RS, RR, and their interplay to anomalies discovered in operational networks. We show that RS by itself can cause route oscillations and loops, and that in all Cisco, Quagga, and XORP implementations, nondeterministic behaviors may occur because of their incorrect modeling of the dependencies between RS and RR. We identify the root cause for each of the instabilities and derive a configuration guideline as well as a functional model to eliminate them.
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Proc. ACM CoNEXT Conference, Madrid, Spain, December 2008.
The article of record as published may be found at http://dx.doi.org/10.1145/1544012.1544021
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Computer Science (CS)
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This research was sponsored by the NSF under the 100x100 Clean Slate Project [1] (NSF-0331653), the 4D Project [2] (NSF-0520187), grants CNS-0520210, CNS-0721574, and a Graduate Research Fellowship.
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This research was sponsored by the NSF under the 100x100 Clean Slate Project [1] (NSF-0331653), the 4D Project [2] (NSF-0520187), grants CNS-0520210, CNS-0721574, and a Graduate Research Fellowship.
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This publication is a work of the U.S. Government as defined in Title 17, United States Code, Section 101. Copyright protection is not available for this work in the United States.
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