Border gateway protocol monitoring system can be cost effective

Network measurement projects such as NLANR, Routeviews and RIPE have greatly advanced people´s ability to understand, manage and engineer the Internet. Meanwhile, the significant maintenance fee to support such monitoring infrastructures motivates us to think about a cost-effective way to manage these systems. In this study, the authors measure, model and evaluate the border gateway protocol (BGP) monitoring system (BGPMon) that is mainly composed of vantage point ASes (i.e. monitors or VPs) peered with Routeviews and RIPE. The results from the authors´ experiments show the feasibility to use fewer VPs while still retaining the original monitoring capability of the existing BGPMon. Only 110 VPs out of the original 438 ones are capable of monitoring most of the information for all the six metrics with the optimum VP selection method given in this paper. The authors further evaluate the selected VPs at different times and observe that the performance is encouragingly stable, for example, more than 99´ of the information for five out of the six metrics can be constantly captured with less than 110 VPs in random samples.