Design and implementation of BGP novel control mechanism (BGP-NCM) based on network performance parameters

Abstract

Abstract Border Gateway Protocol (BGP) is the defecto standard routing protocol of the internet and has served as backbone technology for logical routing tasks to provide global connectivity in the world. Unfortunately, there are limitations on network performance factors such as latency or link utilization which are not used in BGP routing decisions. These limitations have a great effect on internet services, especially bandwidth sensitive application, where BGP does not automatically redistribute the traffic over different Multihomed links based on link utilization or latency. In this paper, a novel control mechanism for BGP (BGP-NCM) is proposed. BGP-NCM is a software controller which has been developed and injected in the Enterprise or internet service provider BGP multihomed network to force the traffic redistribution over the available links based on the link utilization or latency. The BGP-NCM has been developed using Python programming language and it consists of three modules which are Monitoring, Traffic Calculation and Configuration modules. BGP-NCM will keep an eye on link utilization by checking the monitoring tool log and when the link utilization reaches a predefined value, the BGP-NCM traffic calculation module will be triggered to determine the amount of traffic and corresponding IP prefix as well as the target link with available bandwidth to accommodate the redistributed traffic. Our results show that BGP-NCM solves the traffic redistribution problem without any change in both BGP protocol and running internet infrastructure.