Projecting future IPv4 router requirements from trends in dynamic BGP behaviour
Geoff Huston, Grenville J. Armitage · Swinburne figshare (Swinburne University of Technology) · 2006
For the past 17 years the Internet has used the Border Gateway Protocol (BGP) to manage inter-domain routing. The dynamic behaviour of BGP in operational networks has rarely been studied to date. Yet the processing load of BGP is of intense interest to router vendors and internet service providers, as the stability of the Internet depends on routers being able to keep up with BGP state changes. We analyse 146 million BGP update messages logged over the entire year of 2005 to discover evidence of an aggressively increasing demand for processing power in route engines out to 2010.