Comparing Community Networks to the Internet: An Empirical Study of BGP Behaviour

Community networks are a new, emerging form of organising local network access and access to the public Internet where people themselves operate and build their networks. However, little research has been performed on the stability of the resulting bottom-up infrastructure. In this work, the BGP behaviour of community networks is empirically studied by evaluating dumps of BGP messages from the AWMN and Guifi community networks and comparing the results to data from the public Internet. The preliminary results show that community networks are significantly less stable, although the public Internet shows a significantly higher ratio of update messages over withdrawal messages.