Differentiated BGP Update Processing for Improved Routing Convergence

Internet routers today can be overwhelmed by a large number of BGP updates triggered by events such as session resets, link failures, and policy changes. Such excessive updates can delay routing convergence, which, in turn, degrades the performance of delay- and jitter-sensitive applications. This paper proposes a simple and novel idea of differentiated processing of BGP updates to reduce routers' load and improve routing convergence without changing the protocol semantics.