RIPE "Golden Networks" Document ID - 229/210/178

Thu Sep 2 23:09:44 UTC 2004

On Fri, 3 Sep 2004 00:15:42 +0200
Iljitsch van Beijnum <iljitsch at muada.com> wrote:

> But then again, dampening really doesn't buy you much as it only 
> applies to routes that are flapping beyond the link to the next AS. So > if you have an instable link somewhere, you can't dampen that 
> instability away yourself.

And this is the point: dampening can actually lead to decreased network stability and non-deterministic behavior.  Granted, this behavior is exasperated by not deploying a common dampening policy across all ASes (which is the why RIPE-229 was written).

This would not be as problematic if dampening could be applied to a path rather than a prefix, since an alternate could then be selected.  But since this would require modifications to core aspects of BGP (and additional memory and processor requirements) it does not seem a likely solution.