Benchmarking BGP Routers Qiang Wu, Yong Liao, Tilman Wolf, and Lixin Gao Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering University of Massachusetts, Amherst, MA, USA {qwu,yliao,wolf,lgao}@ecs.umass.edu Abstract— Determining which routes to use when forwarding protocol to ensure Internet-wide inter-operability. In the cur- traffic is one of the major processing tasks in the control rent Internet, the Border Gateway Protocol (BGP) [2] is the plane of computer networks. We present a novel benchmark routing protocol that is used across all autonomous systems. that evaluates the performance of the most commonly used Internet-wide routing protocol, the Border Gateway Protocol A number of different criteria are used when computing a (BGP). Using this benchmark, we evaluate four different systems path to a destination including distance, local policies, and that implement BGP, including a uni-core and a dual-core available alternatives. Determining the best path for all prefixes workstation, an embedded network processor, and a commercial and processing the information exchanges with peer routers router. We present performance results for these systems under requires significant amounts of computational resources. It various loads of cross-traffic and explore the tradeoffs between different system architectures. Our observations help identify is therefore important to understand what processing perfor- bottlenecks and limitations in current systems and can lead to mance is necessary for BGP routers and what commonly next-generation router architectures that are better optimized for found system architectures perform best. Further, depending this important workload. on the system design, there is potential for contention for processing resources between the data plan and the control I. INTRODUCTION plane. This interaction can have a significant performance Computer networks provide data communication capabil- impact on routing and forwarding capabilities of a router ities by connecting end-systems through links and routers. system. Routers send network traffic from link to link while ensuring In this paper, we study the performance of different BGP that it eventually reaches its destination. Routers implement routers and measure their capabilities under different scenar- most of the complexity of networks and are conceptually ios. Specifically, the contributions of our paper are: divided into two domains: control plane and data plane. The • The design of a benchmark for BGP routers that exercises data plane operates on network traffic, while the control plane different workload scenarios based on different routing manages the operations in the data plane. The data plane per- information exchanges that occur in a network. This formance of both software-based and hardware-based routers benchmark is the basis for being able to generating has been extensively studied and evaluated. With the Internet repeatable performance measurements of different BGP continuing to increase in size and complexity, control plane router systems. performance of routers is becoming increasingly important [1]. • A discussion of four router systems with different pro- Arguably the most important control plane functionality of cessor designs (uni-core router, dual-core router, network routers is to determine what the most opportune path through processor router, and commercial router) that represent a the network is to reach any destination. This is determined broad range of possible router implementations. through routing algorithms that provide the best “next hop” • A measurement study of processing performance of all (i.e., neighboring router) for any destination in the network. four systems when exercised by the BGP benchmark. Routing algorithms use information about nodes and links in This performance is also measured for various levels of the network, which is obtained by exchanging data with neigh- cross-traffic that exercises the forwarding capabilities of boring routers. To achieve scalability in large networks like the the router. Internet, routing can be structured hierarchically: Networks The remainder of the paper is organized as follows. Sec- are divided into autonomous systems (AS) (e.g., a corporate tion II discusses related work. Section III introduces the BGP network or a Internet Service Provider network) and routing benchmark. The different router systems are presented in is done separately within an AS (intra-AS routing) and among Section IV. Performance results are shown and discussed in ASes (inter-AS routing). Intra-AS routing is typically of lower Section V. Section VI summarizes and concludes this paper. complexity than inter-AS routing since it is constrained to a smaller number of nodes that are all administered by the same II. RELATED WORK entity. Inter-AS routing, in contrast, is more complex as it Computer networks can use a number of different routing involves all autonomous systems in the Internet (currently over protocols. The most commonly used ones are the Border 20,000) and all advertised IP destination prefixes (currently Gateway Protocol (BGP) [2] for inter-AS routing and Open over 180,000) and is the topic of this paper. Shortest Path First (OSPF) [3] and Routing Information Pro- Inter-AS routing needs to be implemented via a single tocol (RIP) [4] for intra-AS routing. The OSPF protocol uses link-state information to computer a shortest path spanning with each other. After that, routing updates are sent only upon tree between the router and all destinations. The RIP protocol changes in network topology or routing policy. uses distance vector information to determine the shortest There are two kinds of routing update message used in path to all destinations. Both OSPF and RIP use a single BGP: announcement and withdrawal. A route announcement metric (hop counts or link weights) to determine the path indicates that a router has either learned how to reach a new traffic should take. In BGP, which explained in more detail destination network or made a policy decision of preferring an- in Section III, additional policy rules can be used determine other route to a destination network. The destination network is routes. This feature increases the complexity significantly over represented by an IP prefix. Route withdrawals are sent when OSPF and RIP. a BGP speaker makes a new local decision that a network is no The scale of the Internet and the complexity of BGP policies longer reachable via any path. BGP limits the distribution of a has lead to observations of BGP instabilities [5]. A direct router’s reachability information to its neighbor BGP routers implication is that routers need to continuously process BGP only. Each route is attached with an AS path indicating the updates from their neighbors. Typically, BGP routers need to AS sequences along which the route passes through. After process in the order of 100 BGP messages per second. In a BGP speaker detects a routing change by receiving update case of network-wide events (e.g., worm attacks) the number messages from neighbors, the BGP speaker needs to re-select of BGP messages can increase by 2-3 orders of magnitude [6]. the new “best” path based on what it has learned from the If a router cannot handle these peak loads, it may not be able update messages. The route selection in BGP can be very to send keep-alive messages to its neighbor and thus trigger complicated and it is always policy-based [11], which depends additional events. It is therefore important to benchmark the on the commercial relationship between different domains. If peak number of BGP messages that a router can handle as we the AS relationship is not considered, most vendors implement do in this paper. In related work, Agarwal et al. have explored the best path selection based on the length of AS path [12], the CPU utilization of BGP routers [7], but have fallen short although it is not specified in the BGP RFC document [2]. of providing a comprehensive BGP benchmark and analyzing In a typical BGP implementation, all the routes are stored the performance of different router architectures in detail. in Routing Information Bases (RIBs) in the memory of the In the context of forwarding packets, routers need to deter- BGP speaker. There are three RIBs in BGP, namely, the Adj- mine to which neighbor traffic is supposed to be sent. In the RIBs-In,theLoc-RIB, and the Adj-RIBs-Out, as defined in [2]. Internet, IP addresses are allocated by prefixes as specified Routes that will be advertised to other BGP speakers must be in Classless Inter-Domain Routing (CIDR) [8]. In order to present in the Adj-RIB-Out; routes that will be used by the determine to which destination prefix a packet belongs, address local BGP speaker must be present in the Loc-RIB; and routes lookup algorithms are used. This lookup process can be the that are received from other BGP speakers are present in the most processing intensive component of packet forwarding Adj-RIBs-In. For a given prefix, the router’s BGP decision when routing tables are large. Ruiz-Sanchez´ et al. have com- process computes the most preferred route to that prefix from piled a survey of contemporary lookup algorithms [9]. With all the Adj-RIB-Ins and stores it in the Loc-RIB. The decision more diverse uses of the Internet, there is also a trend towards process then determines what subset of the Loc-RIB should classifying packets by more than just their destination address be advertised to each neighbor and that subset is stored in (e.g., different service levels). This requires more complex a per-neighbor database, the Adj-RIBs-Out. In summary, the flow classification algorithms [10]. Adj-RIBs-In contain unprocessed routing information that has been advertised to the local BGP speaker by its neighbors; III. BGP BENCHMARK the Loc-RIB contains the routes that have been selected by To put our BGP benchmark into context, we first provide a the local BGP speaker’s decision process; and the Adj-RIBs- more detailed overview of BGP operation.