Detection of Trial and Error Traffic Engineering with BGP-4

BGP-4 is the routing protocol which holds the Internet together. Additionally and in the absence of a better solution, it is being used for traffic engineering purposes. In the absense of standardised procedures, each autonomous system in the Internet implements traffic engineering based on non-collaborative goals and using Trial and Error techniques. This paper analyses Trial and Error Traffic Engineering. BGP-4 update sequences which flag the use of Trial and Error Traffic Engineering techniques are presented, along with an algorithm to detect them. A Trial and Error Traffic Engineering abnormality is presented. It was detected when Analysing the RIPE routing repositories using the detection algorithm.