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Origins of Internet routing instability

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 to convergence. At the extreme, high levels of routing instability have led to the loss of internal connectivity in wide-area, national networks. In an earlier study of inter-domain routing, we described widespread, significant pathological behaviour in the routing information exchanged between backbone service providers at the major US 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 behaviour. 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 to a rise in Internet routing instability.