BGP molecules: Understanding and predicting prefix failures

The Border Gateway Protocol (BGP), the de-facto Internet interdomain routing protocol, disseminates information about Internet prefixes to Autonomous Systems (ASes). Prefixes are announced and withdrawn as routes and policies change, making them unreachable from portions of the Internet for certain time periods. This paper aims to predict routing failures of prefixes in the Internet.We investigate the similarity of prefixes in the Internet with respect to their propensity to fail, i.e., become unreachable. Given a prefix of interest, we define a “BGP molecule” - the prefixes in the Internet that are likely to fail together with this prefix. We show that the AS paths to prefixes, coupled with knowledge of the prefix geographical location, contribute to its failure tendency. The BGP molecules constructed are used in four failure prediction schemes among which a hybrid scheme achieves 91% predictability of failures with 99.3% coverage of prefixes in the Internet.