Internet Routing Instability Craig Lab ovitz, G. Rob ert Malan, and Farnam Jahanian UniversityofMichigan Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science 1301 Beal Ave. Ann Arb or, Michigan 48109-2122 flab ovit, rmalan,
[email protected] network reachability and top ology information, has a num- Abstract b er of origins including router con guration errors, transient This pap er examines the network inter-domain routing in- physical and data link problems, and software bugs. Insta- formation exchanged b etween backb one service providers at bility, also referred to as \route aps", signi cantl y con- the ma jor U.S. public Internet exchange p oints. Internet tributes to p o or end-to-end network p erformance and de- routing instabili ty, or the rapid uctuation of network reach- grades the overall eciency of the Internet infrastructure. ability information, is an imp ortant problem currently fac- All of these sources of network instabili ty result in a large ing the Internet engineering community. High levels of net- numb er of routing up dates that are passed to the core Inter- work instabili ty can lead to packet loss, increased network net exchange p oint routers. Network instabili ty can spread latency and time to convergence. At the extreme, high lev- from router to router and propagate throughout the net- els of routing instabilityhave lead to the loss of internal work. At the extreme, route aps have led to the transient connectivity in wide-area, national networks. In this pap er, loss of connectivity for large p ortions of the Internet.