Assessing the Impact of Cascading Failures on the Interdomain Routing System of the Internet

Abstract

The Internet is a typical complex network, whose traffic load is controlled by the inter-domain routing system. Due to the co-location of data plane and control plane of Border Gateway Protocol, the survivability of inter-domain routing system is sensitive to severe congestion. Therefore, an initial outage may lead to a cascade of failures in the Internet. But the cascading failures on links are able to be automatically restored when the congestion is mitigated. In this paper, we propose a model - CAFEIN for characterizing this special process. Based on CAFEIN, we assess the difference of impact under intentional attacks and random breakdowns; identify the worst affected part of the Internet; and study the propagation of cascading failures. Through simulations, we find that the cascading failures bring a great deal of added burden to the routing system. However, the cascading effect is amplified globally when the relative capacity of links is very low. Moreover, the difference of impact between intentional attack and random breakdown is not as prominent as previous research due to the unique automatic-restoration process.