End-to-end Routing Behavior in the Internet

arXiv (Cornell University), 2009

By focusing on what can be observed by running traceroute-like measurements at a high frequency from a single monitor to a fixed destination set, we show that the observed view of the topology is constantly evolving at a pace much higher than expected. Repeated measurements discover new IP addresses at a constant rate, for long period of times (up to several months). In order to provide explanations, we study this phenomenon both at the IP, and at the Autonomous System levels. We show that this renewal of IP addresses is partially caused by a BGP routing dynamics, altering paths between existing ASes. Furthermore, we conjecture that an intra AS routing dynamics is another cause of this phenomenon.

2008

ABSTRACT The global Internet routing infrastructure is a large scale distributed system where routing changes occur all the time. While prior work on Internet routing dynamics examined routing stability to individual destinations, in this paper we study the routing stability of the Internet as a whole. We use the observed changes in the number of routes over each ASAS link as a metric and measure such changes from multiple vantage points over a period of one year.

IEEE Transactions on Dependable and Secure Computing, 2006

Several research studies have been devoted to improving the reliability and performance of the Internet by utilizing redundant communication paths between end points. Multihoming, coupled with intelligent route control, and overlay networks are two main streams in this area of research which attempt to leverage redundant connections of the Internet for increased reliability and performance. However, the effectiveness of these approaches depends on the natural diversity of redundant paths between two endhosts in terms of physical links, routing infrastructure, administrative control, and geographical distribution. Even in the case of redundant paths, if traffic between two hosts is not actually routed along completely disjoint paths, congestion or failure of a single shared link or router can adversely affect the end-to-end performance or availability of all paths. This paper presents an experimental study of path diversity on the Internet, focusing on the impact of path diversity on multihomed and overlay networks. We base our analysis on traceroutes and routing table data collected from several vantage points in the Internet including: looking glasses at 10 major Internet Service Providers (ISPs), RouteViews servers from 20 ISPs, and more than 50 PlanetLab nodes globally distributed across the Internet. Using this data, we quantify the extent of path diversity in multihoming and overlay networks, highlighting the limitations, and also identifying the source of the limitations in these architectures. From the analysis, we learn that both multihoming route control and current overlay networks are not able to ensure path diversity, which makes it very difficult to provide high-availability services even with the use of these systems. We believe that this work provides the insight into building future systems based on understanding path diversity.

2009 Fourth International Conference on Internet Monitoring and Protection, 2009

By focusing on what can be observed by running traceroute-like measurements at a high frequency from a single monitor to a fixed destination set, we show that the observed view of the topology is constantly evolving at a pace much higher than expected. Repeated measurements discover new IP addresses at a constant rate, for long periods of times (up to several months). In order to provide explanations, we study this phenomenon both at the IP, and at the Autonomous System levels. We show that this renewal of IP addresses is partially caused by a BGP routing dynamics, altering paths between existing ASes. Furthermore, we conjecture that an intra AS routing dynamics is another cause of this phenomenon.

Routing policies used in the Internet can be restrictive, limiting communication between source-destination pairs to one path, when often better alternatives exist. To avoid route flapping, recovery mechanisms may be dampened, making adaptation slow. Unstructured overlays have been proposed to mitigate the issues of path and performance failures in the Internet by routing through an indirect-path via overlay peer(s). Choosing alternate-paths in overlay networks is a challenging issue. Ensuring both availability and performance guarantees on alternate paths requires aggressive monitoring of all overlay paths using active probing; this limits scalability. An alternate technique to select an overlay-path is to bias its selection based on physical disjointness criteria to bypass the failure on the primary-path. Recently, several techniques have emerged which can optimize the selection of a disjoint-path without incurring the high costs associated with probing paths. In this paper, we sh...

2012

The Internet provides physical path diversity between a large number of hosts, making it possible for networks to use alternative paths when one path fails to deliver the required Quality of . However, for various reasons, many established protocols (e.g. de facto Internet inter-domain routing protocol, Border-Gateway Protocol -BGP) do not fully exploit such alternate paths. This paper surveys research into techniques for discovering end-to-end alternate paths, including those based on monitoring path performance, choosing paths that are maximally disjoint, and in routing across multiple paths. It surveys proposals for making BGP better able to exploit multiple paths and how multi-homing can create alternate paths. It also describes how alternate paths can be realized through detour routing (application layer mechanisms) and routing deflections (network layer mechanisms). It also discusses Fast Re-Route techniques for construction of backup routes. It concludes by surveying open research issues into the discovery and use of alternate paths in the Internet.

2003

BGP, the Border Gateway Protocol, is the de facto standard protocol for performing interdomain routing on the Internet today. Its main function is to distribute reachability information across the Internet, serving as the "glue" that holds the Internet together. BGP allows flexible configuration of routing policies from each local network and scalable operation, both at the cost of global visibility leading to complex and hard to predict dynamic behavior. BGP's dynamic behavior has so far received relatively little attention in the research community, due to ill-understood operational practices as well as insufficient resources to perform experiments. This thesis combines controlled active measurement in a testbed environment as well as on the actual Internet, correlating routing traffic with the forwarding plane and analyzing the protocol in detail using simulations to expose problems of interdomain routing dynamics. This class of problems may be difficult to reason statically due to the interaction of protocol components and can be observed more easily during run time. They include reachability, forwarding behavior, ix 5.9 Overall percentage of suppressed signals due route flap damping for each Beacon and on a per peer basis for Cisco and Juniper.. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. . 5.10 Percentage of suppressed Beacon signals due to announcement and withdrawal. . 5.11 The inter-arrival time distribution for each of the three Beacons as seen from Ciscolike and Juniper-like routers. The vertical dotted lines are drawn at 30 second intervals.113 5.12 The inter-arrival time distribution for Cisco-like last hop routers, and Beacon 1. . 5.

Proceedings of the 2007 ACM CoNEXT conference on - CoNEXT '07, 2007

Internet interdomain routing is policy-driven, and thus physical connectivity does not imply reachability. On average, routing on today's Internet works quite well, ensuring reachability for most networks and achieving reasonable performance across most paths. However, there is a serious lack of understanding of Internet routing resilience to significant but realistic failures such as those caused by the 911 event, the 2003 Northeast blackout, and the recent Taiwan earthquake in December 2006. In this paper, we systematically analyze how the current Internet routing system reacts to various types of failures by developing a realistic failure model, and then pinpoint reliability bottlenecks of the Internet. For validity of our simulation results, we generate topology graphs by addressing concerns over the incompleteness of topology and the inaccuracy of inferred AS relationships. By focusing on the impact of structural and policy properties, our analysis provides guidelines for future Internet design. The simulation tool we provide for analyzing routing resilience is also efficient to scale to Internet-size topologies.

Computer Communications, 2011

Maps of the internet topology are generally obtained by measuring the routes from a given set of sources to a given set of destinations (with tools such as traceroute). It has been shown that this approach misses some links and nodes. Worse, in some cases it can induce a bias in the obtained data, i.e. the properties of the obtained maps are significantly different from those of the real topology. In order to reduce this bias, the general approach consists in increasing the number of sources. Some works have studied the relevance of this approach. Most of them have used theoretical results, or simulations on network models. Some papers have used real data obtained from actual measurement procedures to evaluate the importance of the number of sources and destinations, but no work to our knowledge has studied extensively the importance of the choice of sources or destinations. Here, we use real data from internet topology measurements to study this question: by comparing partial measurements to our complete data, we can evaluate the impact of adding sources or destinations on the observed properties. We show that the number of sources and destinations used plays a role in the observed properties, but that their choice, and not only their number, also has a strong influence on the observations. We then study common statistics used to describe the internet topology, and show that they behave differently: some can be trusted once the number of sources and destinations are not too small, while others are difficult to evaluate.

ACM SIGCOMM Computer Communication Review, 2004

This paper presents a methodology for identifying the autonomous system (or systems) responsible when a routing change is observed and propagated by BGP. The origin of such a routing instability is deduced by examining and correlating BGP updates for many prefixes gathered at many observation points. Although interpreting BGP updates can be perplexing, we find that we can pinpoint the origin to either a single AS or a session between two ASes in most cases. We verify our methodology in two phases. First, we perform simulations on an AS topology derived from actual BGP updates using routing policies that are compatible with inferred peering/customer/provider relationships. In these simulations, in which network and router behavior are "ideal", we inject inter-AS link failures and demonstrate that our methodology can effectively identify most origins of instability. We then develop several heuristics to cope with the limitations of the actual BGP update propagation process and monitoring infrastructure, and apply our methodology and evaluation techniques to actual BGP updates gathered at hundreds of observation points. This approach of relying on data from BGP simulations as well as from measurements enables us to evaluate the inference quality achieved by our approach under ideal situations and how it is correlated with the actual quality and the number of observation points.