Design and simulation of a supplemental protocol for BGP

Internet policy routing has attracted a lot of attention in the last decade and it is believed that this topic will become even more important in the foreseeable future. The growing diversity of the Internet brings in many organizations under different authorities with conflicting interests. Each such organization forms an Autonomous System (AS), with its own policy regulating network traffic across its boundaries to protect valuable network resources. As a result, a policy violation at any intermediate AS may cause a packet to be silently dropped before reaching its destination. The Border Gateway Protocol (BGP) was introduced to solve this packet-dropping problem in the mid-1990s, followed by a series of revisions. Currently, BGP is the dominant protocol in this field. However, BGP is a distance-vector and hop-by-hop protocol, resulting in a loss of reachability information for some destinations, even though feasible routes to those destinations may physically exist. Unreachable destinations under BGP are not necessarily truly unreachable. To overcome this deficiency, this paper presents a source policy route discovery protocol to supplement BGP. Simulation results show that almost all the false negative unreachable destinations can be resolved by the proposed protocol.