Inter-AS Inbound Traffic Engineering via ASPP

AS Path Prepending (ASPP) is a popular method for the inter-AS inbound traffic engineering, which is known to be more difficult than the outbound traffic engineering. Although the ASPP approach has been extensively practised by many ASes, it is surprising that there still lacks a systematic study of this approach and the basic understanding of its effectiveness. In this paper, we introduce the concept, applicability and potential instability problem of the ASPP approach. Some guidelines are given as the first step to study the method to avoid instability problem. Finally, we study the dynamic prepending behavior of ISPs and show a real-world pathologic case of prepending instability based on our measurement study of RouteViews data.