Soliciting your opinions on Internet routing: A survey on BGP convergence

Mon Jan 9 22:56:41 UTC 2017

Hi NANOG,

We often read that the Internet (i.e. BGP) is "slow to converge". But how slow
is it really? Do you care anyway? And can we (researchers) do anything about it?
Please help us out to find out by answering our short anonymous survey 
(<10 minutes).

Survey URL: https://goo.gl/forms/JZd2CK0EFpCk0c272 <https://goo.gl/forms/WW7KX5kT45m6UUM82>

** Background:

While existing fast-reroute mechanisms enable sub-second convergence upon 
local outages (planned or not), they do not apply to remote outages happening 
further away from your AS as their detection and protection mechanisms only 
work locally.

Remote outages therefore mandate a "BGP-only" convergence which tends to be
slow, as long streams of BGP UPDATEs (containing up to 100,000s of them) must
be propagated router-by-router. Our initial measurements indicate that it can
take state-of-the-art BGP routers dozens of seconds to process and propagate
these large streams of BGP UPDATEs. During this time, traffic for important
destinations can be lost.

** This survey:

This survey aims at evaluating the impact of slow BGP convergence on
operational practices. We expect the findings to increase the understanding of
the perceived BGP convergence in the Internet, which could then help
researchers to design better fast-reroute mechanisms.

We expect the questionnaire to be filled out by network operators whose job relates
to BGP operations. It has a total of 17 questions and should take less 10 minutes
to answer. The survey and the collected data are anonymous (so please do *not*
include information that may help to identify you or your organization). 
All questions are optional, so if you don't like a question or don't know the answer,
please skip it.

A summary of the aggregate results will be published as a part of a scientific
article later this year.

Thank you so much in advance, and we look forward to read your responses!

Laurent Vanbever (ETH Zürich, Switzerland)

PS: It goes without saying that we would be also extremely grateful if you could
forward this email to any operator you might know who may not read NANOG.