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BGP was initially created assuming by default that all ASes are equal. Its policies and protocols, namely BGP, evolved to accommodate a hierarchical Internet, allowing an autonomous system more control over outgoing traffic than incoming traffic. However, the modern Internet is flat, making BGP asymmetrical. In particular, routing decisions are mostly in the hands of traffic sources (i.e., content providers). This leads to suboptimal routing decisions as traffic sources can only estimate route capacity at the destination (i.e., ISP). In this paper, we present the design of Unison, a system that allows an ISP to jointly optimize its intra-domain routes and inter-domain routes, in collaboration with content providers. Unison provides the ISP operator and the neighbors of the ISP with an abstraction ISP network in the form of a virtual switch. This abstraction allows the content providers to program the virtual switch with their requirements. It also allows the ISP to use that information to optimize the overall performance of its network. We show through extensive simulations that Unison can improve ISP throughput by up to 30% through cooperation with content providers. We also show that cooperation of content providers only improves performance, even for non-cooperating content providers (e.g., a single cooperating neighbour can improve ISP throughput by up to 6%).
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This content will become publicly available on December 10, 2025
Uncovering BGP Action Communities and Community Squatters in the Wild
The Border Gateway Protocol (BGP) offers several knobs to control routing decisions, but they are coarse-grained and only affect routes received from neighboring Autonomous Systems (AS). To enhance policy expressiveness, BGP was extended with thecommunitiesattribute, allowing an AS to attach metadata to routes and influence the routing decisions of a remote AS. The metadata can carryinformationto (e.g., where a route was received) or request anactionfrom a remote AS (e.g., not to export a route to one of its neighbors). Unfortunately, the semantics of BGP communities are not standardized, lack universal rules, and are poorly documented. In this work, we design and evaluate algorithms to automatically uncover BGPaction communitiesand ASes that violate standard practices by consistently using theinformation communitiesof other ASes, revealing undocumented relationships between them (e.g., siblings). Our experimental evaluation with billions of route announcements from public BGP route collectors from 2018 to 2023 uncovers previously unknown AS relationships and shows that our algorithm for identifying action communities achieves average precision and recall of 92.5% and 86.5%, respectively.
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- Award ID(s):
- 2344761
- PAR ID:
- 10586455
- Publisher / Repository:
- ACM
- Date Published:
- Journal Name:
- Proceedings of the ACM on Measurement and Analysis of Computing Systems
- Volume:
- 8
- Issue:
- 3
- ISSN:
- 2476-1249
- Page Range / eLocation ID:
- 1 to 23
- Format(s):
- Medium: X
- Sponsoring Org:
- National Science Foundation
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