Skip to main content
SpringerLink
Log in
Book cover

Guide to Reliable Internet Services and Applications pp 357–394Cite as

Measurements of Control Plane Reliability and Performance

  • Chapter
  • First Online:

  • 843 Accesses

Part of the book series: Computer Communications and Networks ((CCN))

Abstract

The control plane deals with how data traffic flows through a network from a source to a destination. It consists of routers and routing protocols – the latter are implemented by software processes running on routers, which communicate with one another to determine the path from the source to the destination. As a result, their performance and reliability form a cornerstone for the overall performance of the network, and monitoring their performance is crucial for service providers. This chapter focuses on control plane monitoring (also known as route monitoring) by describing (i) how data is collected from the routers’ control plane, (ii) how the data is used for various network management tasks including performance assessment, and (iii) how a case study of route monitors are realized in real life.

This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution.

Chapter
USD   29.95
Price excludes VAT (USA)
  • Available as PDF
  • Read on any device
  • Instant download
  • Own it forever
eBook
USD   129.00
Price excludes VAT (USA)
  • Available as EPUB and PDF
  • Read on any device
  • Instant download
  • Own it forever
Softcover Book
USD   169.99
Price excludes VAT (USA)
  • Compact, lightweight edition
  • Dispatched in 3 to 5 business days
  • Free shipping worldwide - see info
Hardcover Book
USD   169.99
Price excludes VAT (USA)
  • Durable hardcover edition
  • Dispatched in 3 to 5 business days
  • Free shipping worldwide - see info

Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout

Purchases are for personal use only

Learn about institutional subscriptions

Notes

  1. 1.

    Even though an IGP like OSPF is used for routing within an AS, the boundary of an IGP domain and an AS do not have to coincide. An AS may consist of multiple IGP domains; conversely, a single IGP domain may span multiple ASes.

  2. 2.

    The original OSPF specification [6] required each link to be assigned to exactly one area, but a recent extension [12] allows a single link to be assigned to multiple areas.

  3. 3.

    A router running a distance-vector protocol sends its selected route for a given prefix to all its neighbors, except the next-hop of the route when split horizon [8] is implemented. It is this selected route that we are interested in, and will receive, at the management station.

  4. 4.

    The exact algorithm for spreading traffic across ECMPs is implemented in the forwarding engine of routers.

  5. 5.

    The term stability refers to the stability of BGP routes, which roughly corresponds to how frequently they undergo changes.

  6. 6.

    With distance-vector protocols, two or more routers can get locked into a cyclical dependency where each router in the cycle uses the previous router as a next-hop for reaching a destination. The routers then increment their distance to the destination in a step-wise fashion until all of them reach infinity, which is termed as “counting to infinity”. For more details, refer to [8].

  7. 7.

    As explained in Section 11.2.1.1, hot-potato routing refers to BGP’s propensity to select the shortest way out of its local AS to a prefix when presented with multiple equally good routes (i.e., ways out of the AS). This allows an AS to hand off data packets as quickly as possible to its neighboring AS much like a hot potato.

  8. 8.

    A Router-LSA in OSPF is originated by every router to describe its outgoing links to adjacent routers along with their associated weights.

  9. 9.

    A PIM domain is defined as a contiguous set of routers all configured to operate within a common boundary. All routers in the domain must map a group address to the same RP.

References

  1. Shaikh, A., & Greenberg, A. (2004). OSPF monitoring: architecture, design and deployment experience. In Proceedings of USENIX Symposium on Networked Systems Design and Implementation (NSDI), San Francisco, California, March 2004.

    Google Scholar 

  2. Cormen, T. H., Leiserson, C. E., Rivest, R. L., & Stein, C. (2001). Introduction to algorithms, second ed. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.

    MATH  Google Scholar 

  3. Malkin, G. (1998). RIP Version 2. IETF Request for Comments (RFC) 2453, November 1998.

    Google Scholar 

  4. Garcia-Luna-Aceves, J. (1989). A unified approach to loop-free routing using distance vector or link states. In Proceedings of ACM SIGCOMM, Austin, Texas, September 1989.

    Google Scholar 

  5. Rekhter, Y., Li, T., & Hares, S. (2006). A border gateway protocol 4 (BGP-4). IETF Request for Comments (RFC) 4271, January 2006.

    Google Scholar 

  6. Moy, J. (1998). OSPF Version 2. IETF Request for Comments (RFC) 2328, April 1998.

    Google Scholar 

  7. Callon, R. (1990). Use of OSI IS-IS for routing in TCP/IP and dual environments. IETF Request for Comments (RFC) 1195, December 1990.

    Google Scholar 

  8. Huitema, C. (1999). Routing in the Internet. Prentice Hall PTR, second ed., Upper Saddle River, New Jersey, December 1999.

    Google Scholar 

  9. Stewart, J. W. (1998). BGP4: inter-domain routing in the Internet. Addison-Wesley, Upper Saddle River, New Jersey, December 1998.

    Google Scholar 

  10. Bates, T., Chen, E., & Chandra, R. (2006). BGP route reflection: an alternative to full mesh Internal BGP (IBGP). IETF Request for Comments (RFC) 4456, April 2006.

    Google Scholar 

  11. Moy, J. (1998). OSPF: Anatomy of an Internet routing protocol. Addison-Wesley, Reading, Massachusetts, February 1998.

    Google Scholar 

  12. Mirtorabi, S., Psenak, P., Lindem, A., & Oswal, A. (2008). OSPF multi-area adjacency. IETF Request for Comments (RFC) 5185, May 2008.

    Google Scholar 

  13. Mauro, D., & Schmidt, K. (2005). Essential SNMP. O’Reilly & Associates, second ed., Sebastopol, California, September 2005.

    Google Scholar 

  14. Patrick, N., Scholl, T., Shaikh, A., & Steenbergen, R. (2006). Peering dragnet: examining BGP routes received from peers. North American Network Operators’ Group (NANOG) presentation, October 2006.

    Google Scholar 

  15. University of Oregon Route Views Project. http://www.routeviews.org/.

  16. RIPE Routing Information Service (RIS). http://www.ripe.net/ris/index.html.

  17. Feamster, N., & Rexford, J. (2007). Network-wide prediction of BGP routes. IEEE/ACM Transactions on Networking, pp. 253–266, April 2007.

    Google Scholar 

  18. Rosen, E., & Rekhter, Y. (2006). BGP/MPLS IP Virtual Private Networks (VPNs). IETF Request for Comments (RFC) 4364, February 2006.

    Google Scholar 

  19. Kim, C., Gerber, A., Lund, C., Pei, D., & Sen, S. (2008). Scalable VPN routing via relaying. In Proceedings of ACM SIGMETRICS, Annapolis, Maryland, June 2008.

    Google Scholar 

  20. Govindan, R., & Reddy, A. (1997). An analysis of Internet inter-domain topology and route stability. In Proceedings of IEEE INFOCOM, Kobe, Japan, pp. 850–857, 1997.

    Google Scholar 

  21. Labovitz, C., Malan, G. R., & Jahanian, F. (1998). Internet routing instability. IEEE/ACM Transactions on Networking, 6, pp. 515–528, October 1998.

    Google Scholar 

  22. Labovitz, C., Malan, G. R., & Jahanian, F. (1999). Origins of Internet routing instability. In Proceedings of IEEE INFOCOM, New York, New York, pp. 218–226, 1999.

    Google Scholar 

  23. Labovitz, C., Ahuja, A., Bose, A., & Jahanian, F. (2001). Delayed Internet routing convergence. IEEE/ACM Transactions on Networking, 9, pp. 293–306, June 2001.

    Google Scholar 

  24. Pei, D., Zhao, X., Wang, L., Massey, D., Mankin, A., Wu, S. F., & Zhang, L. (2002). Improving BGP convergence through consistency assertions. In Proceedings of IEEE INFOCOM, New York, New York, 2002.

    Google Scholar 

  25. Bremler-Barr, A., Afek, Y., & Schwarz, S. (2003). Improved BGP convergence via ghost flushing. In Proceedings of IEEE INFOCOM, San Francisco, California, 2003.

    Google Scholar 

  26. Pei, D., Azuma, M., Massey, D., & Zhang, L. (2005). BGP-RCN: improving BGP convergence through root cause notification. Computer Networks Journal, 48, pp. 175–194, June 2005.

    Google Scholar 

  27. Chandrashekar, J., Duan, Z., Krasky, J., & Zhang, Z.-L. (2005). Limiting path exploration in BGP. In Proceedings of IEEE INFOCOM, Miami, Florida, 2005.

    Google Scholar 

  28. Pei, D., Zhang, B., Massey, D., & Zhang, L. (2006). An analysis of path-vector convergence algorithms. Computer Networks Journal, 50, February 2006.

    Google Scholar 

  29. Mao, Z. M., Govindan, R., Varghese, G., & Katz, R. (2002). Route flap damping exacerbates Internet routing convergence. In Proceedings of ACM SIGCOMM, Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, 2002.

    Google Scholar 

  30. Villamizar, C., Chandra, R., & Govindan, R. (1998). BGP route flap damping. IETF Request for Comments (RFC) 2439, November 1998.

    Google Scholar 

  31. Panigl, C., Schmitz, J., Smith, P., & Vistoli, C. (2001). RIPE routing-WG recommendations for coordinated route-flap damping parameters. RIPE document ripe-229, October 2001. ftp://ftp.ripe.net/ripe/docs/ripe-229.txt.

  32. Smith, P., & Panigl, C. (2006). RIPE routing working group recommendations on route-flap damping. RIPE document ripe-378, May 2006. http://www.ripe.net/ripe/docs/ripe-378.html.

  33. Teixeira, R., Shaikh, A., Griffin, T. G., & Rexford, J. (2008). Impact of hot-potato routing changes in IP networks. IEEE/ACM Transactions on Networking, 16, pp. 1295–1307, December 2008.

    Google Scholar 

  34. Route Explorer from Packet Design Inc. http://www.packetdesign.com/products/rex.htm.

  35. Route Analyzer from PacketStorm Communications, Inc. http://www.packetstorm.com/route.php.

  36. Shaikh, A., Isett, C., Greenberg, A., Roughan, M., & Gottlieb, J. (2002). A case study of OSPF behavior in a large enterprise network. In Proceedings of ACM SIGCOMM Internet Measurement Workshop (IMW), Marseille, France, November 2002.

    Google Scholar 

  37. Andersson, L., Minei, I., & Thomas, B. (2007). LDP specification. IETF Request for Comments (RFC) 5036, October 2007.

    Google Scholar 

  38. Awduche, D., Berger, L., Gan, D., Li, T., Srinivasan, V., & Swallow, G. (2001). RSVP-TE: extensions to RSVP for LSP tunnels. IETF Request for Comments (RFC) 3209, December 2001.

    Google Scholar 

  39. Rekhter, Y., & Rosen, E. (2001). Carrying label information in BGP-4. IETF Request for Comments (RFC) 3107, May 2001.

    Google Scholar 

  40. Rosen, E., & Rekhter, Y. (2006). BGP/MPLS IP virtual private networks (VPNs). IETF Request for Comments (RFC) 4364, February 2006.

    Google Scholar 

  41. Srinivasan, C., Viswanathan, A., & Nadeau, T. (2004). Multiprotocol label switching (MPLS) traffic engineering (TE) management information base (MIB). IETF Request for Comments (RFC) 3812, June 2004.

    Google Scholar 

  42. Deering, S. (1988). Multicast routing in internetworks and extended LANs. In Proceedings of ACM SIGCOMM, Stanford, California, pp. 55–64, August 1988.

    Google Scholar 

  43. Cain, B., Deering, S., Kouvelas, I., Fenner, B., & Thyagarajan, A. (2002). Internet group management protocol, Version 3. IETF Request for Comments (RFC) 3376, October 2002.

    Google Scholar 

  44. Casner, S., & Deering, S. (1992). First IETF Internet audiocast. ACM Computer Communication Review, 22, July 1992.

    Google Scholar 

  45. Multicast in MPLS/BGP IP VPNs. Internet draft, July 2008. http://www.ietf.org/internet-drafts/draft-ietf-l3vpn-2547bis-mcast-07.txt.

  46. Multicast virtual private networks. White paper, Cisco Systems, 2002. http://www.cisco.com/warp/public/cc/pd/iosw/prodlit/tcast_wp.pdf.

  47. Waitzman, D., Partridge, C., & Deering, S. (1988). Distance vector multicast routing protocol. IETF Request for Comments (RFC) 1075, November 1988.

    Google Scholar 

  48. Moy, J. (1994). Multicast Extensions to OSPF. IETF Request for Comments (RFC) 1584, March 1994.

    Google Scholar 

  49. Ballardie, T., Francis, P., & Crowcroft, J. (1993). Core based trees (CBT): an architecture for scalable inter-domain multicast routing. In Proceedings of ACM SIGCOMM, San Francisco, California, pp. 85–95, September 1993.

    Google Scholar 

  50. Fenner, B., & Meyer, D. (2003). Multicast source discovery protocol (MSDP). IETF Request for Comments (RFC) 3618, October 2003.

    Google Scholar 

  51. Fenner, B., Handley, M., Holbrook, H., & Kouvelas, I. (2006). Protocol independent multicast – sparse mode (PIM-SM): protocol specification (Revised). IETF Request for Comments (RFC) 4601, August 2006.

    Google Scholar 

  52. Adams, A., Nicholas, J., & Siadak, W. (2005). Protocol independent multicast – dense mode (PIM-DM): protocol specification (Revised). IETF Request for Comments (RFC) 3973, January 2005.

    Google Scholar 

  53. Bhaskar, N., Gall, A., Lingard, J., & Venaas, S. (2008). Bootstrap router (BSR) mechanism for protocol independent multicast (PIM). IETF Request for Comments (RFC) 5059, January 2008.

    Google Scholar 

  54. Partridge, C., Mendez, T., & Milliken, W. (1993). Host anycasting service. IETF Request for Comments (RFC) 1546, November 1993.

    Google Scholar 

  55. McCanne, S. (1999). Scalable multimedia communication using IP multicast and lightweight sessions. IEEE Internet Computing, 3(2), pp. 33–45.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  56. Massey, D., & Fenner, B. (1999). Fault detection in routing protocols. In Proceedings of International Conference on Network Protocols (ICNP), Toronto, Canada, 1999.

    Google Scholar 

  57. Saraç, K., & Almeroth, K. C. (2000). Supporting multicast deployment efforts: a survey of tools for multicast monitoring. Journal of High Speed Networks, 9(3,4), pp. 191–211.

    Google Scholar 

  58. Namburi, P., Saraç, K., & Almeroth, K. C. (2006). Practical utilities for monitoring multicast service availability. Computer Communications Special Issue on Monitoring and Measurement of IP Networks, 29, pp. 1675–1686, June 2006.

    Google Scholar 

  59. McCloghrie, K., Farinacci, D., Thaler, D., & Fenner, B. (2000). Protocol independent multicast MIB for IPv4. IETF Request for Comments (RFC) 2934, October 2000.

    Google Scholar 

  60. McCloghrie, K., Farinacci, D., & Thaler, D. (2000). IPv4 multicast routing MIB. IETF Request for Comments (RFC) 2932, October 2000.

    Google Scholar 

Download references

Author information

Authors and Affiliations

  1. AT&T Labs – Research, Florham Park, NJ, USA

    Lee Breslau & Aman Shaikh

Authors
  1. Lee Breslau
    View author publications

    You can also search for this author in PubMed Google Scholar

  2. Aman Shaikh
    View author publications

    You can also search for this author in PubMed Google Scholar

Corresponding author

Correspondence to Aman Shaikh .

Editor information

Editors and Affiliations

  1. AT & T Labs Research, Park Ave. 180, Florham Park, 07932, USA

    Charles R. Kalmanek

  2. , School of Information Technology, Indian Institute of Technology Kharagpur, Kharagpur, 721302, India

    Sudip Misra

  3. Dept. Computer Science, Yale University, Prospect St. 51, New Haven, 06511, USA

    Yang (Richard) Yang

Rights and permissions

Reprints and permissions

Copyright information

© 2010 Springer-Verlag London

About this chapter

Cite this chapter

Breslau, L., Shaikh, A. (2010). Measurements of Control Plane Reliability and Performance. In: Kalmanek, C., Misra, S., Yang, Y. (eds) Guide to Reliable Internet Services and Applications. Computer Communications and Networks. Springer, London. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-84882-828-5_11

Download citation

  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-84882-828-5_11

  • Published:

  • Publisher Name: Springer, London

  • Print ISBN: 978-1-84882-827-8

  • Online ISBN: 978-1-84882-828-5

  • eBook Packages: Computer ScienceComputer Science (R0)

Publish with us

Policies and ethics

Search

Navigation