Technology pinpoints BGP faults

Start-up Packet Design last week unveiled technology designed to help service providers maintain IP service uptime for their enterprise customers.

The company's Border Gateway Protocol (BGP) root-cause analysis technology is intended to determine which single routing event is the source of millions of others in service provider networks.

BGP, used by virtually all service providers and many large enterprise customers to exchange routing information between interconnected autonomous systems, is a troubleshooting challenge because it is the most "chatty" of routing protocols, according to Packet Design. A minor connectivity change can produce millions of update messages, the firm says.

"The real problem is that what it takes to sort through all of these events and figure out what the root cause is typically requires a very well-trained, very experienced engineer," says Johna Till Johnson, president and chief research officer of Nemertes Research, and a Network World columnist. "One of my engineers told me a couple of years ago, 'There are just too many routers, and they all have too many opinions.'"

Packet Design developed a statistical algorithm that extracts the structure of BGP event streams to determine their root cause. The company created visualization techniques to display and interpret that structure.

The algorithm examines BGP events in real time and identifies the single or multiple sources that trigger them, even if those events are several hops away from the user's network. It provides a real-time topological view of the network to analyze the "tree structure" of BGP events, which helps isolate individual sets of events resulting from a common source.

This technique has the potential to narrow down thousands of events to one Syslog message, Packet Design says.

The technology will be incorporated in Packet Design's Route Explorer network management appliance later this year. Route Explorer provides routing path visibility and analysis of BGP, Open Shortest Path First, Intermediate System-to-Intermediate System and Enhanced Interior Gateway Routing Protocol networks.

The BGP root-cause analysis technology will be demonstrated at NetWorld+Interop Las Vegas, to be held May 11-13. Packet Design says it has at least one customer for the technology, but declined to identify it.

Packet Design Inc. is a spinoff of Packet Design LLC, a company formed in May 2000 by serial entrepreneurs Judy Estrin and Bill Carrico.