BGP and Faucet

I have integrated BGP into Faucet by using Ryu BGP speaker library. A BGP app runs along side with Faucet and speaks BGP with external peers. Update messages received by BGP are forwarded to Faucet. Faucet updates its routing table and converts the updates to flowmods accordingly.

This approach is quite simple and you could replace the BGP app with a routing engine such as Quagga or Bird.

To investigate how well this works and to perform a simple "smoke test" on a virtual network (Mininet/single PC). I implemented a BGP update generator that generated 100 unique updates at the rate of 1000 update/second. Each update contains an announcement of 1, 2 and 5 prefixes. Curious about performance, I measured the time delay between the BGP update and resulting flowmod.

The delay decreases from the first update to the last. It appears the messages are being buffered before being sent. It is unclear where although this might be an artefact of our virtual environment where we have shared resources even though Mininet makes it appear that we don't.

As part of my PhD work, we will evaluate my code changes using a hardware platform. However, this small piece of works shows that it is relatively easy to integrate BGP into Faucet.

Back to the proposal. I'm now writing the literature review, part about multipath routing.