I-seismograph: Observing and measuring Internet earthquakes

Disruptive events such as large-scale power outages, undersea cable cuts, or Internet worms could cause the Internet to deviate from its normal state of operation. This deviation from normalcy is what we refer to as the “impact” on the Internet, or an “Internet earthquake.” As the Internet is a large, complex moving target, to date there has been little successful research on how to observe and quantify the impact on the Internet, whether it is during specific event periods or in real time. In this paper, we devise an Internet seismograph, or I-seismograph, to provide a “Richter scale” for the Internet. Since routing is the most basic function of the Internet and the Border Gateway Protocol (BGP) is the de facto standard inter-domain routing protocol, we focus on BGP. After defining what “impact” means with respect to BGP, we describe how I-seismograph measures the impact, exemplify its usage with several disruptive events, and further validate its accuracy and consistency. We show that we can evaluate the impact on BGP during an arbitrary period, including doing so in real time.