Stability of Interior Routing and Load Balancing Techniques
OCCNC
This is an informational document intended to outline what is known about routing stability of interior gateway protocols (IGPs), traffic engineering techniques (TE) used in MPLS, and load balancing techniques. Known stable and unstable conditions provide bounds of known behavior. Network operators and equipment suppliers have relied heavily on operational experience as existence proof of instability or evidence of apparent stability. Between the bounds of known stable and unstable behavior there may be conditionally stable protocols and deployment scenarios. There is some discussion of the difficulty of mathematical stability proof for some techniques and a challenge to the research community.