Did the Super Bowl Kill the Internet?

Abstract

Given the rapid increase in Internet streaming services to access multimedia content, to the detriment of traditional cable, satellite, and terrestrial, it is to be expected that this traffic will affect the performance of the Internet at several levels. One such level is the communication between autonomous systems that is primarily based on border gateway protocol (BGP). In order to understand this impact, a tool was developed to detect the problems that occur during a specific time period. This tool is able to identify and classify flapping events providing information about the networks potentially involved in the disruptions. The main focus of this paper is the analysis of the BGP updates registered during Super Bowl 2016 in order to understand how a large streaming event affects the Internet at the BGP level. Those results show that an increase in the number of updates happened during key times when a large number of concurrent viewers connected to the game. Many dampening and flapping events were observed accordingly. From those events, networks potentially affected were detected and categorized. The results of our study suggest that the Internet is not prepared to accommodate the potential streaming traffic generated during major events. This is of utmost importance for content providers and content delivery networks in designing their broadcast strategies which should take into consideration not only the scalability of their own servers but also the way in which data reaches the viewer.