A measurement study on potential inter-domain routing diversity

In response to Internet emergencies, Internet resiliency is investigated directly through an autonomous system (AS) level graph inferred from policy-compliant BGP paths or/and traceroute paths. Due to policy-driven inter-domain routing, the physical connectivity does not necessarily imply network reachability in the AS-level graph, i.e., many physical paths are not visible by the inter-domain routing protocol for connectivity recovery during Internet outages. We call the invisible connectivity at the routing layer, which can be quickly restored for recovering routing failures by simple configurations, as the potential routing diversities. In this paper, we evaluate two kinds of potential routing diversities, which are recognized as Internet eXchange Points (IXPs) participant reconnection and peering policy relaxation. Using the most complete dataset containing AS-level map and IXP participants that we can achieve, we successfully evaluate the ability of potential routing diversity for routing recovery during different kinds of Internet emergencies. Encouragingly, our experimental results show that 40% to 80% of the interrupted network pairs can be recovered on average beyond policy-compliant paths, with rich path diversities and a little traffic shifts. Thus, this paper implies that the potential routing diversities are promising venues to address Internet failures.