Abstract
Abstract We analyzed how reliability will be improved by adopting inter-domain multi-path and multi-homing routing when the structure in the Internet changes. We identified the properties of the ideal network structure that will maximize the advantage of multi-path and multi-home routing using mathematical analyses. We focused on how each end-to-end path is built, how many multi-paths exist and how each multi-path consists of multi-path and multi-homing segments. Second, we analyzed the trends in the recent changes in how the Internet is structured from the view point of inter-domain multi-path routing. The mathematical analyses suggest that a large number of multi-paths or multi-homing is not necessary to effectively benefit from multi-path routing. However, it will be important to keep the path length short in the segments where multiple paths are not available. The analyses on the recent changes in the Internet structure suggest that multi-path routing will contribute to improvement of reliability in two different ways. For the autonomous systems away from the Internet core, multi-path routing will improve the reliability by going around the busy Internet core, while it will improve the reliability by distributing network traffic load through the Internet core for the autonomous systems close to the core.
Highlights
Border Gateway Protocol (BGP) has been the default routing protocol for routing inter-domain network traffic in the Internet
We studied how many multi-paths exist between two network domains on average, where such multiple paths exist, and more importantly, what the past trend in the way the Internet’s structure is changing from the viewpoint of multi-path routing
The concept of multi-path routing [22] and load balancing based on multihoming [9, 10] have been introduced, but, by the best knowledge of the authors, there has not been a formal study that analyzed the impact of the network topology to multi-path and multi-homing, especially from a view point of enhancing reliability
Summary
Border Gateway Protocol (BGP) has been the default routing protocol for routing inter-domain network traffic in the Internet. Multi-path routing sustains data transmission from an origin network to a destination network even when the current network path selected by the existing single-path BGP fails. BGP is capable of detecting alternative paths and switching to another on a link failure, existing TCP connections will be dropped due to BGP’s long convergence delay, which necessitates human end users to restart the transmissions [8, 17]. These changes imply that Internet’s structure today can be significantly different from the one that has been the basis of BGP-4 routing protocol If this is true, multi-path routing can be applied to the network of tier-1 ISPs but possibly to the entire Internet [13].
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