Measuring the effects of internet path faults on reactive routing

Empirical evidence suggests that reactive routing systems improve resilience to Internet path failures. They detect and route around faulty paths based on measurements of path performance. This paper seeks to understand why and under what circumstances these techniques are effective. To do so, this paper correlates end-to-end active probing experiments, loss-triggered traceroutes of Internet paths, and BGP routing messages. These correlations shed light on three questions about Internet path failures: (1) Where do failures appear? (2) How long do they last? (3) How do they correlate with BGP routing instability? Data collected over 13 months from an Internet testbed of 31 topologically diverse hosts suggests that most path failures last less than fifteen minutes. Failures that appear in the network core correlate better with BGP instability than failures that appear close to end hosts. On average, most failures precede BGP messages by about four minutes, but there is often increased ...

• Type: Conference
• Year: 2003
• Where: SIGMETRICS
• Authors: Nick Feamster, David G. Andersen, Hari Balakrishnan, M. Frans Kaashoek
• Keywords: BGP Routing Messages, Internet Path Failures, Path Failures, SIGMETRICS 2003