iBGP and Constrained Connectivity

Abstract: We initiate the theoretical study of the problem of minimizing the size of an iBGP overlay in an Autonomous System (AS) in the Internet subject to a natural notion of correctness derived from the standard "hot-potato" routing rules. For both natural versions of the problem (where we measure the size of an overlay by either the number of edges or the maximum degree) we prove that it is NP-hard to approximate to a factor better than $\Omega(\log n)$ and provide approximation algorithms with ratio $\tilde{O}(\sqrt{n})$. In addition, we give a slightly worse $\tilde{O}(n^{2/3})$-approximation based on primal-dual techniques that has the virtue of being both fast and good in practice, which we show via simulations on the actual topologies of five large Autonomous Systems. The main technique we use is a reduction to a new connectivity-based network design problem that we call Constrained Connectivity. In this problem we are given a graph $G=(V,E)$, and for every pair of vertices $u,v \in V$ we are given a set $S(u,v) \subseteq V$ called the safe set of the pair. The goal is to find the smallest subgraph $H$ of $G$ in which every pair of vertices $u,v$ is connected by a path contained in $S(u,v)$. We show that the iBGP problem can be reduced to the special case of Constrained Connectivity where $G = K_n$ and safe sets are defined geometrically based on the IGP distances in the AS. We also believe that Constrained Connectivity is an interesting problem in its own right, so provide stronger hardness results ($2^{\log^{1-\epsilon} n}$-hardness of approximation) and integrality gaps ($n^{1/3 - \epsilon}$) for the general case. On the positive side, we show that Constrained Connectivity turns out to be much simpler for some interesting special cases other than iBGP: when safe sets are symmetric and hierarchical, we give a polynomial time algorithm that computes an optimal solution.