CONSIST - Consistent Internet Route Updates, To be posted before the conference

An Internet router may receive a batch of tens of thousands of BGP (Border Gateway Protocol) updates (insert a new rule or delete/change an existing rule) in any instant (i.e., with the same timestamp). This paper deals with analyzing possible orderings of a batch of updates such that forwarding table consistency is maintained while these updates are performed one at a time as in a table that supports incremental updates rather than batch updates. This analysis results in the system CONSIST, which removes any redundancies in the batch of updates and uses a heuristic to arrange the reduced set of updates into a consistent sequence that results in near minimal increase in table size as the updates are done one by one