Enhancing network performance under single link failure with AS-disjoint BGP extension: [recipient of Best Paper Award]

In this paper we propose an enhancement of the BGP protocol for obtaining AS-disjoint paths in GMPLS multi-domain networks. We evaluate the benefits of having AS-disjoint paths under single inter-domain link failure for two main applications: routing of future connection requests during routing protocol re-convergence and applying multi-domain restoration as survivability mechanism in case of a single link failure. The proposed BGP modification is a simple and effective solution for disjoint path selection in connection-oriented multi-domain networks. Our results show that applying the proper failure notification method combined with our proposal reduces the blocking of new connection requests under protocol re-convergence. Furthermore. we show that our proposal is a valuable complementary process for increasing the network resilience.