A Survey of BGP Session Maintenance Issues and Solutions

The Border Gateway Protocol (BGP) is the routing protocol that glues together the global Internet. BGP makes use of a managed session to maintain a bidirectional error-free session over which reachability information is exchanged between Autonomous Systems (ASes) in the global Internet. Nevertheless, despite its great importance to BGP, this managed session suffers from some weaknesses such as a slow failure mechanism, which may represent a great deal of lost data, and some security problems. This paper surveys both research and standardization efforts relating to BGP session maintenance.