Measuring the internet routing scalability from the perspective of address allocation

The internet faces severe routing scalability problem - the rapid increasing of prefix and updates. There are two classes of factors that contribute to scalability problem: inappropriate allocation of IP addresses and inappropriate usage of them. Existing works mainly focus on inappropriate usage of allocations, so this work focuses on inappropriate allocation of IP addresses. We carry out the measurement from two perspectives. From the perspective of each AS, we classify preprocessed prefixes according to their contribution to aggregating addresses inside the AS. We find that factors due to inappropriate allocation of IP address contribute more than that of inappropriate usage of them in values. From the perspective of Internet, we propose a new metric Brother Prefix Distance, which implies the likelihood of aggregating addresses of different ASes. We find that Brother Prefix Distance increase over time, which implies that impact of address allocation on routing scalability increases over time.