Multi-State Border Gateway Protocol for Multi-Domain Software Defined Networking–Based Gateways

Abstract

Border Gateway Protocol (BGP) is a path-vector routing protocol used to exchange routing and reachability information between autonomous system (AS) that offers flexibility and scalability. BGP is capable of handling scalability issues using classless inter-domain routing and is more efficient than alternatives. However, BGP related challenges have been encountered, including growing routing tables, load balancing issues, hijacking, and AS transit delays, leading to increased convergence delay. Convergence delay is the time gap between the commencement of the best-path selection process and when the router is updated. Convergence delay has become a significant issue for larger networks because frequent routing path updates can lead to network instability. Network instability causes packet loss, delayed packet delivery and occasional loss of network connectivity. The research aims to incorporate Software Defined Networking (SDN) technology with gateway operation to reduce the BGP convergence time.