Understanding IPv4 prefix de-aggregation: Challenges for routing scalability

The Internet has become a vast and complex infrastructure. One of the aspects of deeper concern in the community is routing scalability, which involves both the size and dynamics of the global Internet routing table. Many Future Internet initiatives stand for “clean slate” or disruptive approaches to overcome this issue; nevertheless, network operators need evolutionary solutions. In this paper we put forward a characterization of the IP prefix de-aggregation factor focussing on the Latin American region, where we found that a significant contribution to the growth of the routing table could be prevented by improving BGP configuration. In the context of our participation in the LISP+ALT testbed (an evolutionary Future Internet initiative), we identify initial management requirements for its deployment, according to our findings regarding the size and dynamics of the routing table.