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Abstract
The Border Gateway Protocol (BGP) is the de facto standard inter-domain protocol used in today's global Internet, and its behavior is not well understood. As part of a collection of high-performance and scalable network simulation tools called SSFNet, we have built an implementation of BGP which we expect will help shed some light on problems such as routing instability and convergence.

This model has been constructed with the intention of aiding researchers whose goal is a better understanding of BGP and its interaction in the large-scale networking environment. It has already been used to demonstrate oscillatory behaviors described in previous research (Varadhan, Govindan and Estrin; Griffin and Wilfong) and delayed convergence properties (Labovitz, Ahuja, Bose, Jahanian).

Currently we are using the simulator to further study convergence behaviors under varying topologies, policy choices, and internal AS structures (iBGP), among other characteristics.

Slide List
01.  Investigation of Global Network Routing Behavior
02.  Overview
03.  What is BGP?
04.  Convergence Beliefs
05.  Interior vs. Exterior Routing Protocols [courtesy of Tim Griffin]
06.  AS graphs obscure topology! [courtesy of Tim Griffin]
07.  What to do?
08.  Pros and Cons
09.  SSF, Raceway and SSFNet
10.  SSF.OS.BGP4
11.  SSF.OS.BGP4 Functionality
12.  Package SSF.OS.BGP4 Organization
13.  Validation Methodology
14.  [Example Validation Test Topology (Route Reflection Test)]
15.  [Example Validation Test Topology (General End-to-End Connectivity Test)]
16.  [Example Validation Test Topology (Interior BGP Test)]
17.  Interesting Possibilities
18.  Previous Convergence Research [1 of 2] [courtesy of Craig Labovitz]
19.  Previous Convergence Research [2 of 2] [courtesy of Craig Labovitz]
20.  An Experiment with SSF.OS.BGP4
21.  Experiment Example and Data
22.  Sample Output
23.  Future Work
24.  Information
25.  SSF.OS.BGP4 Primary Classes [extra slide]
26.  Coming Soon ... [extra slide]
27.  [DML code example 1] [extra slide]
28.  [DML code example 2] [extra slide]