Route flap damping mechanism modification to improve BGP convergence

Border Gateway Protocol (BGP) is the only routing protocol for the internet. This protocol suffers from unstable routes. Two major built-in mechanisms have been designed to work against the impact of these unstable routes. One of them is Route Flap Damping (RFD), which is designed to detect and suppress flapping or unstable routes. However, most operators have disabled RFD, which has been found to severely penalize sites for being well connected because of the high number of update messages these sites exchange. Given that the current parameter value for RFD is causing a delay by damping some paths for an hour, this paper proposes a new value reuse threshold to help make the mechanism more effective. With the new value, the time required to reuse the stabilize route will decrease. This will help to enable the RFD, which will decrease BGP churn compared to when RFD is turned off.