A Survey on Efforts to Evolve the Control Plane of Inter-Domain Routing

The Internet’s default inter-domain routing protocol is the Border Gateway Protocol (BGP). With the BGP, dozens of thousands of Autonomous Systems (ASs) exchange network layer reachability information to manage connectivity among them. The BGP was introduced in the early stages of the Internet, and although the BGP is one of the most successful protocols, new desirable features have been difficult to incorporate into the network over the decades. Thus, this paper classifies previous works to evolve the control plane of inter-domain routing into three types of approaches: brand new design; incremental improvement; inter-domain communication. The main goal of this paper is to provide an understanding of what approaches have been taken to evolve the inter-domain routing control plane. This survey also discusses why the control plane’s issues are hard to evolve and future perspectives for that topic.