A study of packet delivery performance during routing convergence
Dan Pei, L. Wang, Daniel F. Massey, S. Felix Wu, Le Zhang · 2004
Internet measurements have shown that network failures happen frequently, and that existing routing protocols can take multiple seconds, or even minutes, to converge after a failure. During these routing convergence periods, some packets may already be en-route to their destinations and new packets may be sent. These in-ight packets can en-counter routing loops, delays, and losses. However, little is known about how many packets are delivered (or not de-livered) during routing convergence periods. In this paper, we study the impact of topological connec-tivity and routing protocol designs on the packet delivery during routing convergence. We examine three distributed routing protocols: RIP, Distributed Bellman Ford and BGP through protocol analysis and simulation experiments. Our study shows that the packet delivery ratio improves as the network connectivity becomes richer. However differences in routing protocol designs impact their ability to fully uti-lize the topological redundancy in face of component fail-ures. Two factors in routing protocol design, keeping al-ternate path information at each router and quickly prop-agating new reachability information, appear to have the most impact on the packet delivery behavior during con-vergence. 1