Catch the Spike: On the Locality of Individual BGP Update Bursts

Internet scalability depends on scalability of its core routing protocol - Border Gateway Protocol (BGP). However, dynamics of BGP still conceal many unanswered questions. Most of these questions are related to BGP update messages: root cause of update spikes, correlation between update spikes in the different parts of the Internet and influence of individual spikes on global routing. This article presents a methodology to locate routing events behind specific BGP update spikes. The method explores correlated updates seen on different vantage points [1]. Although previous work [2] uses similar approach to identify origin of update bursts, we revise the question considering one-second update spikes as a point of view. This concept allows not only to identify an area where the routing event has happened, but also to find, how an individual BGP update spike was formed, i.e. find a propagation path for a set of routing events behind the spike. Revealed propagation paths - if analysed for a significant amount of update messages - could tell us new facts about specific types of routing events and improve our understanding of BGP scalability.