An Active Approach to Measuring Routing Dynamics Induced by Autonomous Systems
Venue
Workshop of Experimental Computer Science (ExpCS), ACM (2007)
Publication Year
2007
Authors
Samantha Lo, Rocky K. C. Chang, Lorenzo Colitti
BibTeX
Abstract
We present an active measurement study of the routing dynamics induced by AS-path
prepending, a common method for controlling the inbound traffic of a multi-homed
ISP. Unlike other inter-domain inbound traffic engineering methods, AS-path
prepending not only provides network resilience but does not increase routing table
size. Unfortunately, ISPs often perform prepending on a trail-and-error basis,
which can lead to suboptimal results and to a large amount of network churn. We
study these effects by actively injecting prepended routes into the Internet
routing system using the RIPE NCC RIS route collectors and observing the resulting
changes from almost 200 publicly-accessible sources of BGP information. Our results
show that our prepending methods are simple and effective and that a small number
of ASes is often responsible for large amounts of the route changes caused by
prepending. Furthermore, we show that our methods are able to reveal hidden
prepending policies to prepending and tie-breaking decisions made by ASes; this is
useful for further predicting the behavior of prepending.
