On Inferring Autonomous System Relationships in the Internet

I read this paper after the previous lecture paper on Interdomain routing, which made this paper a lot easier to read. It seems like the author was trying to create a model of the current internet interdomain struture using the BGP protocol assumptions to infer the various relationships of the internet.

The first half of the paper explains the BGP protocol again and the different relationships that exists in the protocol. IT then describes the algorithms it uses to infer the relationships and model the routing tables. The decisions made by each router regarding how the routing tables are exported and imported are based on the different relationships (provider-customer, peer-to-peer etc), and these algorithms were written into a perl program and ran. The results came out very well, as 99.1% of the inference results was confirmed by AT&T.

Without any background for research in networks, this paper was a very good read. First it confirms the previous lecture in saying that most of the network routing is driven by profit, not speed or quality. Looking at the results of the paper, over 90% of the relationships that were inferred on the internet is a provide-customer relationship. This means that even though there are ASes that share peer-to-peer relationships, but it's less than 10%. In a management of technology class that i just took, the professor defined successful engineering as coming up with something useful. He then defined usefulness to mean profitable. Basically, anything that is profitable enough to sustain itself is useful. Looks like the internet is also a good example of it.