IGPs in use

Wed Oct 14 19:14:36 UTC 1998

smd at clock.org (Sean M. Doran) writes:

> BGP is fundamentally rate-limited by virtue of running on TCP.

While that's necessary, it turns out to not be sufficient.  A competent
implementation must also meter out the changes that it sends to a peer in
some sensical fashion.  IOS, for example, had a hack in it so that if it
was blowing out memory, it would rate limit the number of updates that it
would send to a peer.

> By contrast, IGPs are *not* fundamentally rate-limited --
> retransmissions are not congestion avoiding in any IGP that
> I know of.  

In addition to the specifications that Henk has noted, it's become very
clear that an IGP implementation that does NOT rate limit itself is very
likely to become unstable.

Tony