Understanding Transit-Edge routing separation: Analysis and characterization

With the significant increase in the Internet traffic, the uncoordinated routing practices across border gateways are limiting the Internet growth. It is becoming urgent to rethink the principles underlying the Internet infrastructure as well as the design of its major protocols, especially those related to Internet routing and traffic engineering. In its support, an appropriate characterization of the current Internet properties seems necessary as it may provide valuable information for the design of future Internet protocols. In this paper, we analyze Internet routing maps over a two-year period within a Transit-Edge (T-E) routing separation perspective, a promising direction to improve Internet resiliency and security by allowing explicit forwarding through routing locators on the way toward the destination network. We focus on the characterization of the behavior of edge and transit Autonomous Systems (ASes) in terms of interconnection, routing and traffic engineering practices, highlighting similarities and differences. We show in particular that edge networks significantly perform incoming traffic engineering and that this trend is increasing in time.