BGP Routing Stability of Popular Destinations

Jennifer L. Rexford, Jia Wang, Zhen Xiao, Yin Zhang

Research output: Chapter in Book/Report/Conference proceedingConference contribution

205 Scopus citations

Abstract

The Border Gateway Protocol (BGP) plays a crucial role in the delivery of traffic in the Internet. Fluctuations in BGP routes cause degradation in user performance, increased processing load on routers, and changes in the distribution of traffic load over the network. Although earlier studies have raised concern that BGP routes change quite often, previous work has not considered whether these routing fluctuations affect a significant portion of the traffic. This paper shows that the small number of popular destinations responsible for the bulk of Internet traffic have remarkably stable BGP routes. The vast majority of BGP instability stems from a small number of unpopular destinations. We draw these conclusions from a joint analysis of BGP update messages and flow-level traffic measurements from AT&T's IP backbone. In addition, we analyze the routing stability of destination prefixes corresponding to the NetRating's list of popular Web sites using the update messages collected by the RouteViews and RIPE-NCC servers. Our results suggest that operators can engineer their networks under the assumption that the BGP advertisements associated with most of the traffic are reasonably stable.

Original languageEnglish (US)
Title of host publicationProceedings of the 2nd Internet Measurement Workshop (IMW 2002)
PublisherAssociation for Computing Machinery (ACM)
Pages197-202
Number of pages6
ISBN (Print)158113603X, 9781581136036
DOIs
StatePublished - 2002
EventProceedings of the 2nd Internet Measurement Workshop (IMW 2002) - Marseille, France
Duration: Nov 6 2002Nov 8 2002

Publication series

NameProceedings of the 2nd Internet Measurement Workshop (IMW 2002)

Other

OtherProceedings of the 2nd Internet Measurement Workshop (IMW 2002)
Country/TerritoryFrance
CityMarseille
Period11/6/0211/8/02

All Science Journal Classification (ASJC) codes

  • General Engineering

Fingerprint

Dive into the research topics of 'BGP Routing Stability of Popular Destinations'. Together they form a unique fingerprint.

Cite this