Working Around BGP: An Improvement of BGP Session Maintenance

The border gateway protocol (BGP) is the routing protocol that glues together the global Internet. BGP makes use of a "managed session" to maintain a bidirectional error-free session over which reachability information is exchanged between autonomous systems (ASes) in the global Internet. Nevertheless, despite its great importance to BGP, this "managed session" suffers from some weaknesses such as a slow failure mechanism, which may represent a great deal of lost data, and some security problems. Besides, some important services to BGP are missed such as multi-session and broadcasting. To overcome these weaknesses, session maintenance should be separated from BGP protocol. Instead, a separate managed session protocol (MSP) should cope with session maintenance. Accordingly, we argue that our approach may reduce BGP design complexity, increase both BGP reliability and robustness, and lead to a routing system that is easier to manage. We also describe our prototype implementation and some evaluation details