This paper examines the network routing messages exchanged between core Internet backbone routers. 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 t o convergence. At the extreme, high levels of routing instability have led to the loss of internal connectivity in widearea, national networks. In an earlier study of inter-domain routing, we described widespread, significant pathological behaviors in the routing information exchanged between backbone service providers at the major U.S. public Internet exchange points. These pathologies included several orders of magnitude more routing updates in the Internet core than anticipated, large numbers of duplicate routing messages, and unexpected frequency components between routing instability events. The work described in this paper extends our earlier analysis by identifying the origins of several of these observed pathological Internet routing behaviors. We show that as a result of specific router vendor software changes suggested by our earlier analysis, the volume of Internet routing updates has decreased by an order of magnitude. We also describe additional router software changes that can decrease the volume of routing updates exchanged in the Internet core by an additional 30 percent or more. We conclude with a discussion of trends in the evolution of Internet architecture and policy that may lead t o a rise in Internet routing instability.

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 thii 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.

This paper examines the network interdomain 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 led 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.

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