Implications of the topological properties of Internet traffic on traffic engineering

S. Uhlig, V. Magnin, O. Bonaventure, C. Rapier and L. Deri

In this paper we study the behavior of Internet traffic on the AS-level topology and discuss its implications on interdomain traffic engineering. We rely on two notable interdomain traffic traces, the first is one month long and the other is one day long. This study shows that interdomain paths are stable for a large majority of the traffic from a routing viewpoint. We show that the aggregation of the traffic occurring on the AS-level graph is essentially limited to direct peers, with almost no aggregation occurring at larger AS hop distances. Furthermore, only part of the AS paths of the AS-level topology that see a lot of traffic are stable, when considering their presence among the largest AS paths on a hourly basis. Relying on the largest AS paths in traffic over a time window to capture the traffic over the next time interval discloses the important variability of the traffic seen by the largest AS paths in traffic. Interdomain traffic engineering is hence due to be difficult because of the limited traffic aggregation on the AS-level topology and the important topological variability of the traffic for a significant percentage of the total traffic.
Published in 19th ACM Symposium on Applied Computing, Special Track on Computer Networks, March 2004.

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