Routing with Deceptive Information

Routing protocols based on the link-state paradigm notoriously suffer from the problem of stale information in highly dynamic traffic scenarios, leading to an overall loss in routing efficiency. Solutions are not easy to come by, since an increase in the frequency of link state advertisements is equally dangerous: route flapping (i.e., periodic route changes that force traffic to be routed through an alternately underloaded set of paths) is one of the main drawbacks. In this paper we propose a novel, yet simple link state mechanism that may deliberately advertise false link state information with the purpose of stabilizing the routing, while keeping a high network utilization.