Putting BGP on the Right Path: Better Performance via Next-Hop Routing

Today’s interdomain routing system does not perform well, because the BGP protocol converges slowly, selects paths without regard for performance, does not support multipath routing, and has numerous security vulnerabilities. Rather than adding mechanisms to an already complex protocol, or redesigning interdomain routing from scratch, we propose making BGP simpler, and handling issues such as dataplane performance and security where they belong—outside the routing protocol. We propose a transition from today’s path-based routing (where routing decisions depend on the entire AS-PATH) to next-hop routing—a solution that selects and exports routes based only on the neighboring domain. Based on theoretical and experimental results, we show that next-hop routing leads to significantly better network performance than path-based routing, and is especially effective at preventing the most serious BGP convergence problems, alongside other advantages (including being more amenable to multipath routing and a reduced attack surface).