routing loops

[Martha Steenstrup <[e-mail]>]

Hi Tony,

I've just reread the BGP-3 specification.  The general looping problem
I am talking about is addressed in a more specific form in section 10,
Detection of Inter-AS Policy Contradictions.  The last paragraph of
that section says:"... the protocol itself does not provide any
mechanism for suppressing the route oscillation that may result from
these unsatisfiable policies".

I don't mean to pick on BGP.  As I've already said, the architecture
document discusses general distance vector algorithms for policy
routing.  It's just that I don't see how you can say that this looping
problem is not a problem in BGP, unless the implementation differs
from the protocol specification.

m