John Heidemann / Papers / The Temporal and Topological Characteristics of BGP Path Changes

The Temporal and Topological Characteristics of BGP Path Changes
Di-Fa Chang, Ramesh Govindan and John Heidemann
USC/Information Sciences Institute

Citation

Di-Fa Chang, Ramesh Govindan and John Heidemann. The Temporal and Topological Characteristics of BGP Path Changes. Proceedings of the International Conference on Network Protocols (Atlanta, Georga, USA, Nov. 2003), 190–199. [PDF] [alt PDF]

Abstract

BGP has been deployed in Internet for more than a decade. However, the events that cause BGP topological changes are not well understood. Although large traces of routing updates seen in BGP operation are collected by RIPE RIS and University of Oregon RouteViews, previous work examines this data set as individual routing updates. This paper describes methods that group routing updates into events. Since one event (a policy change or peering failure) results in many update messages, we cluster updates both temporally and topologically (based on the path vector information). We propose a new approach to analyzing the update traces, classifying the topological impact of routing events, and approximating the distance to the the Autonomous System originating the event. Our analysis provides some insight into routing behavior: First, at least 45% path changes are caused by events on transit peerings. Second, a significant number (23­37%) of path changes are transient, in that routing updates indicate temporary path changes, but they ultimately converge on a path that is identical from the previously stable path. These observations suggest that a content provider cannot guarantee end-to-end routing stability based solely on its relationship with its immediate ISP, and that better detection of transient changes may improve routing stability.

Bibtex Citation

@inproceedings{Chang03a,
  author = {Chang, Di-Fa and Govindan, Ramesh and Heidemann, John},
  title = {The Temporal and Topological Characteristics of BGP Path Changes},
  booktitle = {Proceedings of the  International Conference on Network Protocols},
  year = {2003},
  sortdate = {2003-11-01},
  project = {ant, saman, conser},
  jsubject = {routing},
  publisher = {IEEE},
  address = {Atlanta, Georga, USA},
  month = nov,
  pages = {190--199},
  jlocation = {johnh: pafile},
  keywords = {BGP},
  url = {https://ant.isi.edu/%7ejohnh/PAPERS/Chang03a.html},
  psurl = {https://ant.isi.edu/%7ejohnh/PAPERS/Chang03a.ps.gz},
  pdfurl = {https://ant.isi.edu/%7ejohnh/PAPERS/Chang03a.pdf},
  myorganization = {USC/Information Sciences Institute},
  copyrightholder = {ACM},
  copyrightterms = {
  	Personal use of this material is permitted.  However,
  	permission to reprint/republish this material for advertising
  	or promotional purposes or for creating new collective works
          for resale or redistribution to servers or lists,
  	or to reuse any copyrighted component of this work in other works
  	must be obtained from the IEEE.
  }
}

Copyright

Personal use of this material is permitted. However, permission to reprint/republish this material for advertising or promotional purposes or for creating new collective works for resale or redistribution to servers or lists, or to reuse any copyrighted component of this work in other works must be obtained from the IEEE.
Copyright © by John Heidemann