Information Technology Reference
In-Depth Information
Assessing Survivability of Inter-domain Routing
System under Cascading Failures
Yujing Liu
1
,WeiPeng
1
, Jinshu Su
1
, and Zhilin Wang
2
1
College of Computer, National University of Defense Technology
Changsha, China
{
liuyujing,wpeng,sjs
}
@nudt.edu.cn
2
Education Department, National University of Defense Technology
Changsha, China
wangzhilin@nudt.edu.cn
Abstract.
The Internet is designed to bypass failures by rerouting
around connectivity outages. Consequently, dynamical redistribution of
loads may result in congestion in other networks. Due to the co-location
of data plane and control plane trac of Border Gateway Protocol
(BGP), the survivability of inter-domain routing system is sensitive to
severe congestion. Therefore, an initial outage may lead to a cascade of
failures in the Internet. In this paper, we characterize the survivability
of inter-domain routing system by reachability and number of rerouting
messages, and propose a model for studying the relationship between
the survivability and the capacity of AS links under intentional attacks
and random breakdowns. Through simulations on an empirical topology
of the Internet, we find that the cascading failures bring a great deal
of added burden to almost all the core ASes. When the tolerance pa-
rameter of AS links is less than 0.1, the cascading effect tends to be
amplified globally. Moreover, the effect triggered by intentional attack
is greater than that triggered by random breakdown. But the difference
between them is not as prominent as previous research due to the unique
automatic-restoration process in inter-domain routing system.
Keywords:
the Internet, inter-domain routing, survivability, cascading
failure.
1 Introduction
The Internet is composed of tens of thousands of Autonomous Systems (ASes),
which exchange routing messages with each other by the de-facto inter-domain
routing protocol - BGP. The reliability of BGP is very important to achieve
stable communications in the Internet. Currently, the routing control packets
of BGP share resources such as bandwidth and buffer space with normal data
trac in Internet packet forwarding. This co-location of control plane and data
plane makes BGP sensitive to severe network congestion.
In the Internet, trac is rerouted to bypass malfunctioning segments, prob-
ably leading to overloads on some of other healthy networks, resulting in con-
gestion there. Loss of routing messages due to the congestion can cause BGP
