On routing asymmetry in the Internet

Routing asymmetry in the Internet can significantly affect the manner in which we model and simulate its behavior. In this paper, we study routing asymmetry in the Internet and present quantitative evaluations on the extent of such asymmetry today. Our quantitative evaluations provide a measure of the difference between the forward and reverse paths between two end points. Routing asymmetry has not been studied extensively before; this is primarily due to the lack of a systematic approach for quantifying asymmetry except for simply computing the difference between the forward and reverse path lengths. By applying our framework for representing asymmetry, we quantify routing asymmetry for both US higher education academic networks and general commercial networks at two different levels: the autonomous system (AS) level and the router (or link) level. We take into consideration, not only the difference in the forward and reverse path lengths, but also the AS and link identities and the sequence in which these entities appear on the paths. We measure the AS level routing asymmetry, and provide upper lower bounds on link level routing asymmetry. Our studies show that academic networks appear to be more symmetric than general commercially deployed networks. Furthermore, our studies demonstrate that routing asymmetry exhibits a skewed distribution i.e., a few end-points seem to display a higher extent of participation on asymmetric routes.