Effectiveness of Multi-Hop Negotiation on the Internet

Inter-domain routing has been long considered as an ongoing negotiation on end-to-end paths between service providers. Such negotiations were often believed to be effective in their form of bilateral and single-hop interactions between neighboring ISPs in a rather hierarchical market structure. Traffic engineering policies, multi-homing schemes and peering mechanisms have been often employed as only service performance improvement methods within this localized approach. However, several measurement studies on inter-domain routing have revealed that these methods are not effective at capturing diversity in performance levels and alternative paths offered by the Internet. Recently, several clean-slate Internet architecture proposals have introduced multi-hop negotiation mechanisms in an effort to revitalize inter-domain routing on the Internet. In this work, we quantify how effective these local policy exceptions can be in providing better quality paths. We also analyze the increasing benefits ripened by broadening wide-area route control capabilities of an ISP. Our analysis on traces captured from the Internet quantitatively shows that currently adopted local and single-hop policies are effective only to a certain extent, and multi-hop negotiation mechanisms can significantly increase the quality and performance of end-to-end paths.