Inter-domain Multi-Hop Negotiation for the Internet

Inter-domain connectivity in the Internet is currently established on policy-based shortest-path routing. Business relationships of the Internet entities are translated into routing decisions through policies. Although these policies are built on simple mechanisms provided by BGP, they give rise to very complex market structure. Extensive research efforts have been made to understand common practices of inter-domain policies. In early stages, hierarchical models were thought to be adequate to explain negotiation between the entities over improving routing and expressing routing preferences in general. Then, it has been realized that there are significant number of local policy exceptions and random decision making over hierarchical structure. In this work, we examine how effective these local policy exceptions are in providing better quality paths. Our analysis on traces captured from the Internet quantitatively shows that currently adopted local policies could not be as effective as multi-hop negotiations for the purpose of attaining better paths in terms of multiple path quality metrics.