Boosting the BGP Convergence in SDXes with SWIFT
Philipp Mao, Rüdiger Birkner, Thomas Holterbach, Laurent Vanbever · 2017
BGP, the only inter-domain routing protocol used today, often converges slowly upon outages. While fast-reroute solutions exist, they can only protect from local outages, not remote ones (e.g., a failure in a transit network). To address this problem, we proposed SWIFT, a fast-reroute framework enabling BGP routers to locally restore connectivity upon remote outages by combining fast inference mechanisms in the control-plane with fast data plane updates. While SWIFT is deployable on a per-router basis, we show in this demonstration that we can deploy SWIFT in Software-Defined Internet Exchange Points (SDXes) with a simple software update. We show that "SWIFTing" an SDX is highly beneficial as it enables to converge the entire fabric within few seconds instead of the tens of seconds required by the original software.