Detecting Traffic Engineering from public BGP data

Omar Darwich , Cristel Pelsser and Kevin Vermeulen

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Abstract

Routing is essential to the Internet functioning. However, more and more functions are added to BGP, the inter-AS routing protocol. In addition to providing connectivity for best effort service, it carries flow specification rules and blackholing signals to react to DDoS, routes for virtual private networks, IGP link-state database information among other uses. One such addition is the tweaking of BGP advertisements to engineer the traffic, to direct it on some preferred paths. In this paper we aim to estimate the impact of Traffic Engineering (TE) on the BGP ecosystem. We develop a method to detect the impact in space, that is, to find which traffic engineering technique impacts which prefix and which AS. We design a methodology to pinpoint TE events to quantify the impact on time. We find that on average, a BGP vantage point sees 35% of the announced prefixes impacted by TE. Quantifying the impact of TE on BGP stability, we find that TE events contribute to 39% of BGP updates and 44% of the BGP convergence time, and that prefixes belonging to hypergiants contribute the most to TE.

Publication Details

Publication Type
Conference Paper
Publication Date
March 2025
Published In
Proceedings of the Passive and Active Measurement Conference (PAM)
Location
Buenos Aires, Argentina

BibTeX Citation

@inproceedings{Darwich2025,
	title        = {Detecting Traffic Engineering from public BGP data},
	author       = {Darwich, Omar and Pelsser, Cristel and Vermeulen, Kevin},
	year         = 2025,
	month        = mar,
	booktitle    = {Proceedings of the Passive and Active Measurement Conference ({PAM})},
	address      = {Buenos Aires, Argentina},
	url          = {https://hal.science/hal-04840370},
	organization = {Universidad de San Andrés},
	abstract     = {Routing is essential to the Internet functioning. However, more and more functions are added to BGP, the inter-AS routing protocol. In addition to providing connectivity for best effort service, it carries flow specification rules and blackholing signals to react to DDoS, routes for virtual private networks, IGP link-state database information among other uses. One such addition is the tweaking of BGP advertisements to engineer the traffic, to direct it on some preferred paths. In this paper we aim to estimate the impact of Traffic Engineering (TE) on the BGP ecosystem. We develop a method to detect the impact in space, that is, to find which traffic engineering technique impacts which prefix and which AS. We design a methodology to pinpoint TE events to quantify the impact on time. We find that on average, a BGP vantage point sees 35% of the announced prefixes impacted by TE. Quantifying the impact of TE on BGP stability, we find that TE events contribute to 39% of BGP updates and 44% of the BGP convergence time, and that prefixes belonging to hypergiants contribute the most to TE.},
	groups       = {International Conferences},
	hal_id       = {hal-04840370},
	hal_version  = {v1},
	keywords     = {Traffic Engineering, Internet Measurements, BGP Instability},
	pdf          = {https://hal.science/hal-04840370v1/file/te-paper.pdf}
}

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