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Internet Routing Instability paper

  • From: Rob Malan
  • Date: Tue Jun 24 16:54:30 1997

We finished our camera-ready copy of our paper this weekend, and would like
to share it with a larger audience.  Vern's annoucement reminded us to get
this note out.

You can find a copy of the paper:

"Internet Routing Instability" to appear in Sigcomm '97 at the IPMA website:

	http://www.merit.edu/ipma/analysis/

-Rob

-

The abstract follows:

Internet Routing Instability
Craig Labovitz, G. Robert Malan, and Farnam Jahanian.
Proceedings of the ACM SIGCOMM '97 Conference,
September 1997; Cannes, France. 

This paper examines the network inter-domain routing information
exchanged between backbone service providers at the major
U.S. public Internet exchange points. Internet routing
instability, or the rapid fluctuation of network reachability
information, is an important problem currently facing the
Internet engineering community. High levels of network
instability can lead to packet loss, increased network latency
and time to convergence. At the extreme, high levels of routing
instability have lead to the loss of internal connectivity in
wide-area, national networks.  In this paper, we describe several
unexpected trends in routing instability, and examine a number of
anomalies and pathologies observed in the exchange of
inter-domain routing information.  The analysis in this paper is
based on data collected from BGP routing messages generated by
border routers at five of the Internet core's public exchange
points during a nine month period.  We show that the volume of
these routing updates is several orders of magnitude more than
expected and that the majority of this routing information is
redundant, or pathological.  Furthermore, our analysis reveals
several unexpected trends and ill-behaved systematic properties
in Internet routing.  We finally posit a number of explanations
for these anomalies and evaluate their potential impact on the
Internet infrastructure.