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Internet Path Stability: Exploring the Impact of MPLS Deployment

With constant evolution of the Internet, many of its even well-established properties continue to change. This study re-evaluates the stability and diversity of Internet paths and whether it is affected by the widely deployed Multi-Protocol Label Switching (MPLS). In particular, using traceroutes between large number of source-destination pairs with the Internet Control Message Protocol (ICMP) extensions for the MPLS protocol, we study the stability and diversity of Internet paths as well as the amount of change in Round Trip Time (RTT) associated with a path change between a source-destination pair. Our results indicate that Internet routes are significantly less stable than previously reported. However, MPLS does not contribute significantly to this instability, and most path changes are associated with an insignificant change in RTT. While our route diversity results are not directly comparable with previous results, we find a great diversity of Internet routes: 60% of source-destination pairs in our experiments experienced 10 or more distinct routes in the course of 24 hours.