A Survey of BGP Session Maintenance Issues and Solutions

Abstract

The Border Gateway Protocol (BGP) is the routing protocol that glues together the global Internet. BGP makes use of a managed session to maintain a bidirectional error-free session over which reachability information is exchanged between Autonomous Systems (ASes) in the global Internet. Nevertheless, despite its great importance to BGP, this ``managed session'' suffers from some weaknesses such as a slow failure mechanism, which may represent a great deal of lost data, and some security problems. This paper surveys both research and standardization efforts relating to BGP session maintenance and interdomain routing.