BGP Route Flap Damping

A usage of the BGP routing protocol is described which is capable of reducing the routing traffic passed on to routing peers and therefore the load on these peers without adversely affecting route convergence time for relatively stable routes. This technique has been implemented in commercial products supporting BGP. The technique is also applicable to IDRP. The overall goals are: o to provide a mechanism capable of reducing router processing load caused by instability o in doing so prevent sustained routing oscillations o to do so without sacrificing route convergence time for generally well behaved routes. This must be accomplished keeping other goals of BGP in mind: o pack changes into a small number of updates o preserve consistent routing Villamizar, et. al.