Understanding Route Redistribution Franck Le Geoffrey G. Xie Hui Zhang Carnegie Mellon University Naval Postgraduate School Carnegie Mellon University
[email protected] [email protected] [email protected] Abstract—Route redistribution (RR) has become an integral option local to a router. It designates the dissemination of part of IP network design as the result of a growing need routing information from one protocol process to another for disseminating certain routes across routing protocol bound- within the same router. For routers in the RIP instance to learn aries. While RR is widely used and resembles BGP in several nontrivial aspects, surprisingly, the safety of RR has not been the prefixes in the OSPF instance, a router (e.g., D or E) needs systematically studied by the networking community. This paper to run both a process of RIP and a process of OSPF and inject presents the first analytical model for understanding the effect the OSPF routes into the RIP instance. of RR on network wide routing dynamics and evaluating the As such, router vendors introduced RR to address a need safety of a specific RR configuration. We first illustrate how from network operations. We recently looked at the configura- easily inaccurate configurations of RR may cause severe routing instabilities, including route oscillations and persistent routing tions of some large university campus networks and found that loops. At the same time, general observations regarding the root RR is indeed widely used. However, contrary to traditional causes of these instabilities are provided. We then introduce a routing protocols, there is no standard or RFC formally formal model based on the general observations to represent defining the functionality of RR.