We decided to turn our interest to BGP which we will devote 3 sessions to. In today’s session - the first one - we introduced BGP, looked at the convergence problem, as well as the solution suggested in the paper below.

Gao, Lixin, and Jennifer Rexford. “Stable Internet routing without global coordination.” IEEE/ACM Transactions on networking 9.6 (2001): 681-692.

To play around with BGP as well as general Internet routing:

  • Check out Ripe Stat, e.g. the BGB activity for your IP prefix.

  • Most ISPs provide a /Looking Glass/ service, allowing you to see how a packet would travel from any of the ISP’s switches to a chosen destination. See Hurricane Electrics’ /Looking Glass/.