Towards Inferring Inter-Domain Routing Policies in ISP Networks

Wei LIANG  Jingping BI  Zhongcheng LI  Yiting XIA  

Publication
IEICE TRANSACTIONS on Communications   Vol.E94-B   No.11   pp.3049-3056
Publication Date: 2011/11/01
Online ISSN: 1745-1345
DOI: 10.1587/transcom.E94.B.3049
Print ISSN: 0916-8516
Type of Manuscript: PAPER
Category: Network Management/Operation
Keyword: 
BGP,  routing policy,  verification,  inference,  

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Summary: 
BGP dictates routing between autonomous systems with rich policy mechanisms in today's Internet. Operators translate high-level policy principles into low-level configurations of multiple routers without a comprehensive understanding of the actual effect on the network behaviors, making the routing management and operation an error-prone and time-consuming procedure. A fundamental question to answer is: how to verify the intended routing principles against the actual routing effects of an ISP? In this paper, we develop a methodology RPIM (Routing Policy Inference Model) towards this end. RPIM extracts from the routing tables various policy patterns, which represent certain high-level policy intentions of network operators, and then maps the patterns into specific design primitives that the ISP employs. To the best of our knowledge, we are the first to infer routing policies in ISP networks comprehensively from the aspects of business relationship, traffic engineering, scalability and security. We apply RPIM to 11 ASes selected from RIPE NCC RIS project, and query IRR database to validate our approach. Vast majority of inferred policies are confirmed by the policy registries, and RPIM achieves 96.23% accuracy excluding validation difficulties caused by incompleteness of the IRR database.