Paper Info
Title
Analysis of Varying AS Path Lengths from the Edge of the Network
Abstract
Understanding and analyzing the past and current behavior of the Internet will be instrumental in building tomorrow's more efficient and scalable networks (e.g., the future Internet). In this paper, we study the impact of Autonomous Systems (ASs) paths' end-to-end latency. Unfortunately, due to the diverse set of non-disclosed routing policies among ASs, packets belonging to a certain end-to- end connection may traverse different ASs, causing fluctuating AS paths. Fluctuation of AS paths has been studied in the literature directly from the core of the network. In this paper, we take a different approach to the analysis of the fluctuation, solely from the edge of the network. Specifically, from the end user's perspective, some AS paths may be optimal (or better) and some sub-optimal. Furthermore, there is not a unique definition for sub- optimality as it may be reflected with various measures (e.g., latency) depending on the application requirements and expectations. In this paper we analyze fluctuating AS path lengths (ASPLs) and investigate their impact on the end-to-end latency over the Internet at a greater scale than previous studies. This study was conducted using Scriptroute to probe various PlanetLab nodes. Our results show that all of the source nodes experienced some AS path differences and the ASPL values that the sources use greatly vary. At worst, some nodes experienced different paths over 70% of the time during our measurements. We observed that the largest difference in ASPLs on a particular connection was as high as 6 with an average of 2.5. Moreover, we present real cases where ASPL and latency values are related, inversely related, and not related at all. Finally, we provide a simple definition for suboptimality and analyze the collected data against this definition. We show that overall 82% of the fluctuating paths and 9% of all the traces between source-destination pairs faced sub-optimal AS paths.
Year
DOI
Venue
2010
10.1109/ICC.2010.5502709
Communications
Keywords
Field
DocType
Internet,telecommunication network routing,AS path length,Internet,PlanetLab node,Scriptroute,autonomous system,end-to-end latency,fluctuating path,nondisclosed routing policy,scalable network
PlanetLab,Latency (engineering),Computer science,Network packet,Computer network,Autonomous system (Internet),Autonomous system (mathematics),Scalability,The Internet,Distributed computing,Traverse
Conference
ISSN
ISBN
Citations 
1550-3607
978-1-4244-6402-9
0
PageRank 
References 
Authors
0.34
7
5
Name
Order
Citations
PageRank
A. Selcuk Uluagac130334.95
Raheem A. Beyah236340.35
Roma Kane300.34
Siddharth Joshi48713.74
John A. Copeland545660.84