Abstract
This paper reports the first self-stabilizing Border Gateway Protocol (BGP). BGP is the standard inter-domain routing protocol in the Internet. Self-stabilization is a technique to tolerate arbitrary transient faults.
The routing instability in the Internet can occur due to errors in configuring the routing data structures, the routing policies, transient physical and data link problems, software bugs, and memory corruption. This instability can increase the network latency, slow down the convergence of the routing data structures, and can also cause the partitioning of networks. Most of the previous studies concentrated on routing policies to achieve the convergence of BGP while the oscillations due to transient faults were ignored.
The purpose of self-stabilizing BGP is to solve the routing instability problem when this instability results from transient failures. The self-stabilizing BGP presented here provides a way to detect and automatically recover from this type of faults. Our protocol is combined with an existing protocol to make it resilient to policy conflicts as well.