MRAI Optimization for BGP Convergence Time Reduction without Increasing the Number of Advertisement Messages

The primary cause for the slowness of the Border Gateway Protocol (BGP) convergence delay is the Minimum Route Advertisement Interval (MRAI). The MRAI is a timer with a default value of 30 seconds, which forces the BGP routers to wait for at least that amount of time before sending an advertisement for the same prefix. This process can delay important BGP advertisements. To date, there has been no specific value used by all the networks around the Internet. This paper aims to find the optimum value for the MRAI timer that maximally reduces the convergence time without increasing the number of advertisement messages. The optimal MRAI value founded by this paper reduced the convergence time by minimum 45%.