ETMP-BGP: Effective tunnel-based multi-path BGP routing using software-defined networking

Border Gateway Protocol (BGP) has been the de facto inter-domain routing protocol since it was introduced. Its destination-based routing nature, which is not able to choose a specific end-to-end AS-level route, might overload some popular peering (or inter-AS) links, while making some others underused. This could result in congestion and cause service disruption. To cope with the issue of destination-based routing of BGP, we resort to Software-Defined Networking (SDN) techniques to propose Effective Tunnel-based Multi-path BGP (ETMP-BGP), which is able to obtain the whole control of tunnel-based multi-path BGP routing in terms of AS-level routing. In ETMP-BGP, destinations provide the feedback of path quality to the source. This feedback is used to detect congestions on AS-level routes and adjust such routes accordingly in a per-source basis. That is, ETMP-BGP with SDN is able to get the AS-level global view of Internet and choose a better AS-level end-to-end BGP routing. Through simulations, our results show that ETMP-BGP could mitigate the AS-level congestions and outperforms existing BGP schemes.