Agent system for inter-AS routing error diagnosis

The basic unit of Internet routing is called an autonomous system, or AS, defined as a set of routers under a single technical administration. The Internet currently comprises more than 12,000 AS\´s. Some are university or corporate networks; others are ISP networks. Inside an AS, a single authority controls the deployment of policies and protocols by which routers compute intra-AS paths, including paths to gateway or border routers. For inter-AS routing, the situation is more complicated. Most AS\´s manage the exchange of routing information through the Internet Engineering Task Force\´s border gateway protocol. BGP lets an AS advertise "reachability" information throughout the Internet by sending update information when network topology or routing policies change. BGP is a hop-by-hop protocol, which sends the information only to a gateway router\´s immediate neighbors. At NTT Network Innovation Laboratories, we have developed and are currently testing a multiagent-based system called Encore to automatically diagnose inter-AS routing problems. We briefly describe the problem addressed by the system, its design and current implementation, and recent test results