| During routing convergence processes in BGP system, it is found that the end-to-end reachability can be temporarily disrupted due to transient routing failures or loops in the forwarding paths. This could cause performance degradation and even service disruption in real-time interactive applications. In this paper, we explore feasible modifications of BGP to eliminate these transient failures and loops. First, we find that the existing BGP convergence acceleration solutions, such as ghost-flushing and EPIC, can eliminate transient forwarding loops but exacerbate transient routing failures. Then we propose an indicative re-routing scheme to eliminate transient routing failures. The scheme improves route visibility in BGP system by piggybacking an indicator of alternative paths with each route. However, we find that although the scheme can eliminate transient routing failures it might worsen transient forwarding loops at the same time. Finally, we exploit the synergy of the combination of the two kinds of schemes and propose an indicative+EPIC re-routing scheme. We find that it is capable of eliminating both transient forwarding failures and loops. |