Impact of hot-potato routing changes in IP networks

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 locati...

• Type: Journal
• Year: 2008
• Where: TON
• Authors: Renata Teixeira, Aman Shaikh, Timothy G. Griffin, Jennifer Rexford
• Keywords: BGP Routing Changes, Intradomain Protocol, Routing, TON 2008