On inferring and characterizing Internet routing policies

Border gateway protocol allows autonomous systems (ASes) to apply diverse routing policies for selecting routes and for propagating reachability information to other ASes. Although a significant number of studies have been focused on the Internet topology, little is known about what routing policies network operators employ to configure their networks. In this paper, we infer and characterize routing policies employed in the Internet. We find that routes learned from customers are preferred over those from peers and providers, and those from peers are typically preferred over those from providers. We present an algorithm for inferring and characterizing export policies. We show that ASes announce their prefixes to a selected subset of providers to perform traffic engineering for incoming traffic. We find that the selective announcement routing policies imply that there are much less available paths in the Internet than shown in the AS connectivity graph, and can make the Internet extremely sensitive to failure events. We hope that our findings will help network operators in designing routing policies.