Recurrence behaviour of BGP traffic

The Border Gateway Protocol (BGP) is an Internet routing protocol responsible for exchanging network reachability information between Autonomous Systems (ASes). Monitoring and mining BGP traffic are important aspects to understand and improve the stability of the Internet. However, identifying the characteristics of BGP traffic is much harder than it seems at a first glance where BGP traffic has been identified as complex, voluminous, and noisy. In this paper, we show that BGP traffic can be understood as an aggregation of oscillations of different frequencies from different ASes. Using linear and nonlinear statistical analysis, we show that BGP traffic shows recurrent behaviour. The source of this behaviour is unsynchronised periodic behaviour from a set of ASes.