Impact of hot-potato routing changes in IP networks

  • Authors:
  • Renata Teixeira;Aman Shaikh;Timothy G. Griffin;Jennifer Rexford

  • Affiliations:
  • Laboratoire d'Informatique de Paris 6, CNRS and UPMC Univ Paris 06, Paris, France;AT&T Labs-Research, Florham Park, NJ;Computer Laboratory, University of Cambridge, Cambridge, UK;Department of Computer Science, Princeton University, Princeton, NJ

  • Venue:
  • IEEE/ACM Transactions on Networking (TON)
  • Year:
  • 2008

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Abstract

Despite the architectural separation between intradomain and interdomain routing in the Internet, intradomain protocols do influence the path-selection process in the Border Gateway Protocol (BGP). When choosing between multiple equally-good BGP routes, a router selects the one with the closest egress point, based on the intradomain path cost. Under such hot-potato routing, an intradomain event can trigger BGP routing changes. To characterize the influence of hot-potato routing, we propose a technique for associating BGP routing changes with events visible in the intradomain protocol, and apply our algorithm to a tier-1 ISP backbone network. We show that (i) BGP updates can lag 60 seconds or more behind the intradomain event; (ii) the number of BGP path changes triggered by hot-potato routing has a nearly uniform distribution across destination prefixes; and (iii) the fraction of BGP messages triggered by intradomain changes varies significantly across time and router locations. We show that hot-potato routing changes lead to longer delays in forwarding-plane convergence, shifts in the flow of traffic to neighboring domains, extra externally-visible BGP update messages, and inaccuracies in Internet performance measurements.