A BGP-based mechanism for lowest-cost routing

2002

Abstract: The routing of traffic between Internet domains or Autonomous Systems (ASs), a task known as interdomain routing, is currently handled by the Border Gateway Protocol (BGP). In this paper, we address the problem of interdomain routing from a mechanism-design point of view. We assume that each AS incurs a per-packet cost for carrying transit traffic and, in turn, is

SIAM Journal on Computing, 2011

We present a game-theoretic model that captures many of the intricacies of interdomain routing in today's Internet. In this model, the strategic agents are source nodes located on a network, who aim to send traffic to a unique destination node. The interaction between the agents is dynamic and complex -asynchronous, sequential, and based on partial information. Best-reply dynamics in this model capture crucial aspects of the only interdomain routing protocol de facto, namely the Border Gateway Protocol (BGP).

2006

Interdomain routing is essential to both the stability and efficiency of the global Internet. However, most previous studies focus only on stability, and only on a special class of routing protocols, namely BGP-type, path-vector protocols. In this paper, we conduct a systematic analysis of interdomain routing considering optimality and implementation in strategic settings. We adopt the novel perspective that an interdomain routing system is one which defines a social choice rule that aggregates individual preferences of all of the autonomous systems (ASes) in a network to select interdomain routes with a set of desirable properties. An interdomain routing protocol, then, is a mechanism to implement the identified interdomain routing social choice rule, when the ASes can adopt strategic actions. By pointing out the incompatibility among the desirable properties of an interdomain routing system and the requirements for strategic implementation in distributed settings, we reveal fundamental tradeoffs that must be made when extending BGP or designing the next-generation interdomain routing system. We also provide new insights into BGP, by "reverseengineering" its behaviors from the perspective of social choice and implementation theory.

Distributed Computing, 2006

The Border Gateway Protocol (BGP) for interdomain routing is designed to allow autonomous systems (ASes) to express policy preferences over alternative routes. We model these preferences as arising from an AS's underlying utility for each route and study the problem of finding a set of routes that maximizes the overall welfare (i.e., the sum of all ASes' utilities for their selected routes). We show that, if the utility functions are unrestricted, this problem is NP-hard even to approximate closely. We then study a natural class of restricted utilities that we call nexthop preferences. We present a strategyproof, polynomialtime computable mechanism for welfare-maximizing routing over this restricted domain. However, we show that, in contrast to earlier work on lowest-cost routing mechanism design, this mechanism appears to be incompati

2008

The Border Gateway Protocol (BGP) establishes routes between the smaller networks that make up the Internet, called Autonomous Systems (ASes). ASes are owned by selfinterested, often competing, economic entities. We use economic and game-theoretic tools to show that security enhancements of BGP are sufficient to achieve incentive compatibility in realistic settings, i.e., ensuring that following BGP is the best course of action for every AS in the Internet. Specifically, we show that protocols like soBGP are incentive-compatible. We also propose a new control-plane mechanism for the commercial Internet.

2000

We present a game-theoretic model that captures many of the intricacies of interdomain routing in today's Internet. In this model, the strategic agents are source nodes located on a network, who aim to send tra-c to a unique destination node. The interaction between the agents is dynamic and complex { asynchronous, sequential, and based on partial informa- tion. Best-reply dynamics

annals of telecommunications - annales des télécommunications, 2008

As today's market forces the implementation of quality-of-service-enabled services spanned over multiple administrative domains, isolated and locally optimized interdomain routing decisions become increasingly inadequate. Instead, coordinated routing models are required together with joint optimization goals. Available papers and standardization documents focus on the description of technical means for deployment of interdomain transport services giving little (or no) attention to the problem of evaluating effective interdomain routing patterns. Our paper aims at closing this gap. It presents an iterative distributed process where domains cooperatively determine a (sub)optimal, with respect to a common utility function, flow of interdomain traffic. If all the cooperating domains adhere to the results of this process, they can reduce their operational costs, speed up operations, and increase profits. This paper is a continuation of and -it introduces a modified problem formulation and analyzes the influence of aggregation of intradomain topology on speed and quality of the resolution process.

2013

The current design of BGP implicitly assumes the existence of trust between ASes with respect to exchanging valid BGP updates. This assumption of complete trust is problematic given the frequent announcement of invalid — inaccurate or unnecessary — updates. This paper presents AS-CRED, a reputation service for ASes which quantifies the level of trust one can have with respect to its announcing valid updates. To compute the reputation, AS-CRED analyzes the past updates announced by each observable AS in the Internet, over a time-window, based on well-defined properties. It then classifies the resulting observations into multiple types of feedback. The feedback values are input into a mathematical function for computing AS reputation. The reputation is then used to track the instances of invalid updates

Sigmetrics Performance Evaluation Review, 2000

The Border Gateway Protocol (BGP) allows an autonomous system (AS) to apply diverse local policies for selecting routes and propagating reachability information to other domains. However, BGP permits ASes to have conflicting policies that can lead to routing instability. This paper proposes a set of guidelines for an AS to follow in setting its routing policies, without requiring coordination with other ASes. Our approach exploits the Internet's hierarchical structure and the commercial relationships between ASes to impose a partial order on the set of routes to each destination. The guidelines conform to conventional traffic-engineering practices of ISPs, and provide each AS with significant flexibility in selecting its local policies. Furthermore, the guidelines ensure route convergence even under changes in the topology and routing policies. Drawing on a formal model of BGP, we prove that following our proposed policy guidelines guarantees route convergence. We also describe how our methodology can be applied to new types of relationships between ASes, how to verify the hierarchical AS relationships, and how to realize our policy guidelines. Our approach has significant practical value since it preserves the ability of each AS to apply complex local policies without divulging its BGP configurations to others.

2009

The Border Gateway Protocol (BGP) handles the task of establishing routes between the Autonomous Systems (ASes) that make up the Internet. It is known that it is possible for a group of ASes to define local BGP policies that lead to global BGP protocol oscillations. We close a long standing open question by showing that, for any network, if two stable routing outcomes exist then persistent BGP route oscillations are possible. This is the first non-trivial necessary condition for BGP safety. It shows that BGP safety must always come at the price of severe restrictions on ASes' expressiveness in their choice of routing policies. The technical tools used in our proof may be helpful in the detection of potential route oscillations and their debugging.