On the Accurate Identification of Familiar Inter-Domain Routing Instabilities

Border gateway protocol (BGP) is the de facto inter-domain routing protocol nowadays, and its behavior greatly impacts the end-to-end Internet performance. Various work has been done on revealing the cause and location of BGP routing instability, and they are helpful for operators to recover their networks from routing disasters. However, current approaches have the "magic numbers" problem in choosing the parameters, which prevents the accuracy in finding the correct location from rising above a certain level. In this paper, we present a statistical approach based on pattern matching to accurately identify familiar BGP routing instabilities and pinpoint their locations. Simulation results show that our approach can achieve over 80% locating precision if the ongoing instability is not well isolated, and increases the average locating precision from 60% to 75% for a BGP session availability event.