On the sensitivity of transit ASes to internal failures

Steve Uhlig

Network robustness is something all providers are striving for without being able to know all the aspects it encompasses. A key aspect of network robustness concerns its sensitivity to internal failures. In this paper, we describe a methodology allowing an AS to study the sensitivity of its network to router and link failures. We provide an open-source tool allowing network operators to study the sensitivity of their network to internal failures.
We apply our methodology on the GEANT network. We show that some of the routers and links of GEANT are sensitive to internal failures in terms of the control plane. Our results indicate that improvements can be made to the network design so as to reduce the risk of disruptions due to internal failures. Furthermore, we show great consistency between the results of the control plane and the data plane, indicating that applying the analysis on the control plane might be sufficient to provide insight into how to improve the resilience of the network to internal failures.

In 2005 IEEE International Workshop on IP Operations & Management (IPOM 2005), 2005.

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