Locating internet routing instabilities

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 mon...

• Type: Conference
• Year: 2004
• Where: SIGCOMM
• Authors: Anja Feldmann, Olaf Maennel, Zhuoqing Morley Mao, Arthur W. Berger, Bruce M. Maggs
• Keywords: Actual Bgp Updates, Bgp Updates, Observation Points, SIGCOMM 2004