Evaluating the performance impact of RTR-BIRD in origin validation

Abstract

RTR-BIRD we previously developed is the only software router that is not only capable of the resource public key infrastructure (RPKI) but able to access the route origin authorizations (ROAs) in the practical validated cache. Although RTR-BIRD practically validates origins as opposed to QuaggaSRx implemented by the national institute of standards and technology (NIST), the routing performance of RTR-BIRD in processing a BGP update message was 4900 times worse than the routing performance of BIRD; BIRD took 0.4 millisecond whereas RTR-BIRD took 1.96 seconds per BGP update message. The difference in performance could be neglected if RTR-BIRD deals with only few routing updates in a highly discrete period. The decrease in performance, however, can be considerable if thousands of routing updates are concurrently received by a RTR-BIRD router---for instance, at router-startup or at router-reboot. Moreover, the performance degradation possibly disconnects BGP-peering sessions or imprecisely validates origins. In order to investigate the degradation in performance of RTR-BIRD, we broke up RTRPKI into components depending on its functionalities because the main difference between RTR-BIRD and BIRD is RTRPKI, which figuratively validates origins. From the separation of RTRPKI, we developed few more variations of RTRPKI by differentiating them in components to validate origins. Our simulation results in comparing RTRPKI with those variations revealed that the most problematic component of RTRPKI was the delay to synchronize RTRPKI to its associated cache server, so we detached the synchronization from the origin validation cycle (OVC) of RTR-BIRD. Consequently, our simulation results on the updated RTR-BIRD showed that the updated version validates origins approximately 4475 times faster than the original RTR-BIRD. Furthermore, the new version showed 100 percent accuracy in validating origins by eliminating at most two percent inconsistency of the validation results presented by the original RTR-BIRD router.