Improving the Sustainability of Autonomous Systems

Abstract

The border gateway protocol (BGP) routing system is one of the key components of today's Internet infrastructure. However, the fundamentals of the BGP routing system have remained unchanged since its standardization. The only fault tolerant mechanism currently available is multihoming, which is about increasing the number of peering autonomous systems (ASes). The reliability of the BGP infrastructure is highly dependent on the statically configured links provided by multihoming, and recovery from larger failures requires cooperation among operators in both parties. Such manual process is problematic, especially during disasters, as it severely delays recovery. As a solution to the problem, this paper proposes a novel on-demand BGP peering method to offer ASes the ability to autonomously and dynamically recover from failures. We introduce a new peering model where peering is established only upon failures. These peers are discovered dynamically and peering is established without any prior configuration. Through evaluation using a prototype implementation, the proposed on-demand BGP peering method provided recovery within 3 seconds of the time of the BGP hold timer expiration. The method is designed to ensure applicability to current ASes with flexibility and adaptability to various failures, contributing toward improving the sustainability of ASes.