Policy flooding: reaching BGP-level scalability in data centers with link-state routing

CoNEXT Companion ’26, December 07–10, 2026, Utrecht, Netherlands · 2026

Abstract

Large data center operators have replaced traditional link-state IGPs with BGP, an interdomain protocol repurposed for an intradomain usage. BGP scales well and supports expressive routing policies, but does not expose the underlying topology, restricting the diversity of paths used in the network. A BGP extension, called Add-Path, can be used to improve the diversity of BGP paths, but limit the scalability of BGP. We present policy flooding, a flooding-reduction algorithm for link-state protocols that borrows BGP-style policies to suppress duplicate link-state announcements. Our evaluation shows that policy flooding allows reaching BGP-level scalability, making link-state protocols a viable choice for data centers without inheriting BGP’s limitations.

People

Anthony Doeraene

Cristel Pelsser

Olivier Bonaventure

Cite (BibTeX)

@inproceedings{2026doeraene-policy-flooding-poster,
  title={Policy flooding: reaching BGP-level scalability in data centers with link-state routing},
  author={Anthony Doeraene, Cristel Pelsser, and Olivier Bonaventure},
  booktitle={CoNEXT Companion ’26, December 07–10, 2026, Utrecht, Netherlands },
  pages={1--3},
  year={2026},
  organization={ACM}
}