Packet Design tries to solve BGP’s woes

Border gateway patrol (BGP) has been a long-standing routing protocol, yet it is frocked with problems such as poor reliability and poor security. One Palo Alto-based start-up is trying to mend those problems, not by replacing the protocol, but by augmenting it with another one.

The company has developed what it calls BGP Scalable Transport, or BST, which is supposed to address the reliability and security issues of BGP. The technology works with existing BGP implementations, according to Judy Estrin, CEO of Packet Design.

“We asked, ‘Is there a way to solve the problems of BGP without replacing it?’” Estrin said. “So we developed a companion protocol to sit side by side with BGP.”

Other initiatives developed to deal with BGP’s problems tackle only portions of its troubles, not all, Estrin said, pointing to TCP failover being used by Alcatel and Avici, which she said is expensive to implement and adds a lot of hardware.

One of the biggest problems with BGP is that its lacks the scale necessary to handle today’s traffic requirements, according to Estrin. Transport control protocol (TCP) worked for BGP transport when the Internet was small, but the huge mesh of TCP connections creates numerous efficiency issues. Security and reliability suffer as a result.

To solve those problems, Packet Design’s BST uses “flooding,” whereby messages are sent only from an originating router to a “neighbor” router, and the neighbor router then sends the message onto its neighbor router. That concept contrasts the idea of sending messages from the originating router to all of the routers in a network.

Although Packet Design is in the initial stages of working with routing vendors, the company plans on licensing the technology out to router developers.

But that isn’t necessarily an easy task, as vendors may be hesitant to implement or experiment with technology lacking set standards.

“The whole industry is tightly prioritizing what they need to do,” Estrin said. “A key issue is where the vendors say they want to see standards before implementation,” she said.

She expects the process of getting into router vendors to take around six months.