Observations on traffic flow patterns and traffic engineering practice

Border Gateway Protocol allows ASs to apply diverse routing policies for selecting routes and propagating reachability information to other ASs. This enables network operators to configure routing policies so as to control traffic flows between ASs. However, BGP is not designed for the inter-AS traffic engineering. This makes it difficult to implement effective routing policies to address network performance and utilization problems. Network operators usually tweak routing policies to influence the inter-domain traffic among the available links. This can lead to undesirable traffic flow patterns across the Internet and degrade the Internet traffic performance. In this paper, we show several observations on Internet traffic flow patterns and derive routing policies that give rise to the traffic flow patterns. Our results show that an AS can reach as much as 20% of the prefixes via a peer link even though there is a path via a customer link. In addition, an AS can reach as much as 80% of the prefixes via a provider link even though there is a path via a peer link. Second, we analyze the cause of the prevalence of these traffic patterns. Our analysis shows that an AS typically does not receive the potential route from its customers or peers. Third, we find that alternate routes have with lower propagation delay than the chosen routes for some prefixes. This shows that some traffic engineering practices might adversely affect Internet performance.