2nd International IEEE Conference on Communication System Software and Middleware

Research Article

On Configuring BGP Route Reflectors

  • @INPROCEEDINGS{10.1109/COMSWA.2007.382444,
        author={Yuri Breitbart and Minos Garofalakis and Anupam  Gupta and Amit  Kumar and Rajeev Rastogi},
        title={On Configuring BGP Route Reflectors},
        proceedings={2nd International IEEE Conference on Communication System Software and Middleware},
        publisher={IEEE},
        proceedings_a={COMSWARE},
        year={2007},
        month={7},
        keywords={Algorithm design and analysis  Approximation algorithms  Bandwidth  Costs  Design optimization  Hardware  Network topology  Polynomials  Routing protocols  Web and internet services},
        doi={10.1109/COMSWA.2007.382444}
    }
    
  • Yuri Breitbart
    Minos Garofalakis
    Anupam Gupta
    Amit Kumar
    Rajeev Rastogi
    Year: 2007
    On Configuring BGP Route Reflectors
    COMSWARE
    IEEE
    DOI: 10.1109/COMSWA.2007.382444
Yuri Breitbart1, Minos Garofalakis2, Anupam Gupta3, Amit Kumar4, Rajeev Rastogi5
  • 1: Kent State University
  • 2: Intel Research Berkeley
  • 3: Carnegie Mellon University
  • 4: IIT New Delhi
  • 5: Bell Labs India

Abstract

The Border Gateway Protocol (BGP) is the standard protocol for exchanging routing information between border routers of Autonomous Systems (ASes) in today's Internet. Within an AS, border routers exchange externally-learned BGP route advertisements via Internal-BGP (I-BGP) peerings. Naive solutions for these I-BGP peering sessions (e.g., based on full-mesh topologies) simply cannot scale to the sizes of modern AS networks. Carefully designed route-reflector configurations can drastically reduce the total number and connection cost of the required I-BGP sessions. Nevertheless, no principled algorithmic approaches exist for designing such configurations, and current practice relies on manual reflector selection using simple, ad-hoc rules. In this paper, we address the novel and challenging optimization problems involved in designing effective BGP route-reflector configurations for AS networks. More specifically, we consider the problems of selecting route reflectors in an AS topology to minimize: (1) the total connection cost of all I-BGP peering sessions, and (2) the average distance traversed by route advertisements within the AS. We present NP-hardness results that establish the intractability of these problems, and propose several polynomial-time approximation algorithms (based on LP-rounding and combinatorial techniques) with guaranteed (constant-factor or logarithmic) bounds on the quality of the approximate solution. Our simulation results validate our approach, demonstrating the effectiveness of our configuration algorithms over a wide range of network topologies.