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