The Internet's unexploited path diversity

The connectivity of the Internet at the Autonomous System level is influenced by the network operator policies implemented. These in turn impose a direction to the announcement of address advertisements and, consequently, to the paths that can be used to reach back such destinations. We propose to use directed graphs to properly represent how destinations propagate through the Internet and the number of arc-disjoint paths to quantify this network's path diversity. Moreover, in order to understand the effects that policies have on the connectivity of the Internet, numerical analyses of the resulting directed graphs were conducted. Results demonstrate that, even after policies have been applied, there is still path diversity which the Border Gateway Protocol cannot currently exploit.Comment: Submitted to IEEE Communications Letter

Chain Routing: A novel routing framework for increasing resilience and stability in the Internet

This study investigates the Internet's resilience to instabilities caused by the mismatch of its topological state and routing information. A first numerical analysis proves that the Internet possesses unused path diversity which could be employed to strengthen its resilience to failures. Therefore, a new routing framework called Chain Routing, which takes advantage of such path diversity, is proposed. This novel idea is based in the mathematical concept of complete order, which is a binary relation that is irreflexive, asymmetric, transitive and complete. More important is the fact that complete orders, when represented as a graph, are the most connected digraph that does not contain any cycles. Consequently, a complete order could be applied to route information from a source to a destination with the guarantee that cycles will not develop in a path. A second numerical analysis demonstrates the feasibility of implementing Chain Routing as part of a routing protocol. Finally, an analysis is presented on how network stability could be maintained if a routing protocol integrates complete orders in time and topology