BGP-RCN: improving BGP convergence through root cause notification

This paper presents a new mechanism, called BGP with root cause notification (BGP-RCN), that provides an upper bound of O(d) on routing convergence delay for BGP, where d is the network diameter as measured by the number of AS hops. BGP-RCN lets each routing update message carry the information about the specific cause which triggered the update message. Once a node v receives the first update message triggered by a link failure, v can avoid using any paths that have been obsoleted by the same failure. The basic approach in BGP-RCN is applicable to path vector routing protocols in general. Our analysis and simulation show that BGP-RCN can achieve substantial reduction in both BGP convergence time and the total number of intermediate route changes. 2004 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.