Assessing Survivability of Inter-domain Routing System under Cascading Failures

Abstract

The Internet is designed to bypass failures by rerouting around connectivity outages. Consequently, dynamical redistribution of loads may result in congestion in other networks. Due to the co-location of data plane and control plane traffic of Border Gateway Protocol (BGP), the survivability of inter-domain routing system is sensitive to severe congestion. Therefore, an initial outage may lead to a cascade of failures in the Internet. In this paper, we characterize the survivability of inter-domain routing system by reachability and number of rerouting messages, and propose a model for studying the relationship between the survivability and the capacity of AS links under intentional attacks and random breakdowns. Through simulations on an empirical topology of the Internet, we find that the cascading failures bring a great deal of added burden to almost all the core ASes. When the tolerance parameter of AS links is less than 0.1, the cascading effect tends to be amplified globally. Moreover, the effect triggered by intentional attack is greater than that triggered by random breakdown. But the difference between them is not as prominent as previous research due to the unique automatic-restoration process in inter-domain routing system.