BGP routing: a study at large time scale

We conduct a longterm analysis of BGP routing properties, such as path stability. Our work complements previous studies that examine the BGP routing behavior at smaller time scales, such as its convergence to a routing update. We focus on properties that would reflect the BGP evolution due to growth, policy, and business reasons. We use daily snapshots of a number of BGP tables and we study the evolution of the paths for every IP-prefix advertised between two autonomous systems (source AS, destination AS, IP-prefix). In a high level, we observe that BGP routing is characterized by a) fairly robust routing with usually few dominating paths per prefix, b) routing richness in the advertised paths and c) a significant number of short lived IP-prefix advertisements.