Towards two-dimensional measurement of highly active IP prefixes in BGP

Abstract

Measuring the instability of IP prefixes in BGP is critical for network operation and management. In particular, identifying and investigating the most active prefixes assist in detecting, analyzing, and understanding network problems. The traditional metric to assess the activeness of a prefix is the quantity of BGP update. However, this metric may be strongly affected by monitor-local events: the large amount of updates for a highly active prefix may be caused by an event with rather limited impact area. To cope with the issue, we propose a two-dimensional method: in addition to the traditional metric, Update Quantity (UQ), we introduce Update Visibility (UV). The key idea is that we mark a prefix as a `Highly Active Prefix' only when the large number of updates for it are widely observable. We define five types of active prefixes and propose a measurement method. We apply the method to 947 GB updates; the measurement results show that the two-dimensional method provides a more comprehensive picture of the highly active prefixes in the Internet than traditional single-metric schemes, and provides insights into network operations.