Evaluating Internal BGP Networks from the Data Plane

Feng Zhao, Xicheng Lu, Baosheng Wang, Peidong Zhu

Abstract: This paper focuses on the design of IBGP networks, which are very important to the reliability and stability of Internet. Although several metrics have been presented to measure the robustness of IBGP networks, they only considered the impact of route reflection networks on the control plane. A robust network should have low sensitivity to traffic load variations. So we propose a new metric to characterize the impact of route reflection networks on the data plane, which is called TDR (Traffic Diversion Rate). Simulation results show that adopting the optimal route reflection topology that minimizes TDR will make the network lose or shift much less traffic, compared with adopting the optimal route reflection topologies found according to other metrics.