Patent ID: 8467394

Claim:
A method, comprising: exchanging, by a router in a routing domain, routing information with one or more other routers located external to the routing domain using an exterior gateway protocol (EGP); exchanging, by the router, routing information with one or more other routers located internal to the routing domain using an interior gateway protocol (IGP); detecting a route to be advertised by the IGP is also used as a next-hop attribute of a route advertised by the EGP; in response to detecting that the route to be advertised by the IGP is also used as a next-hop attribute of a route advertised by the EGP, tagging the route advertised by the IGP as an important route for convergence to indicate that the tagged route is to be processed during convergence processing before other routes that have not been tagged; and is advertising the tagged route within the routing domain using the IGP.