Empirical analysis of different hierarchical addressing deployments

Currently the increasing prevalence of multi-homing and traffic engineering leads to an explosive growth of the global routing table. It is well known that hierarchical addressing could improve the routing scalability. Hence, some proposals exploring the routing architecture for future Internet reuse the hierarchical addressing for the locator assignment. However, this may result in some ASes assigned too many prefixes which would consequently make hosts, routers, Internet Service Providers and Domain Name System faced with big challenges. By modeling the Internet AS-level topology using a hierarchical graph, we define the processes of prefix assignment and routing advertisement in different hierarchical addressing deployment ways. Then, we quantify the impact of these deployments on the prefix assignment and the routing scalability based on the real routing data. we find that when the deploying position gets lower, the prefix amount of arbitrary AS is getting smaller, while the size of the global Forwarding Information Base is monotonically increasing. Comparing with the actual Internet's data, suitable deployment ways for hierarchical addressing are obtained. With these deployment ways, the excessive prefix problem is solved and the size of the global Forwarding Information Base could be reduced into 56% or even 32% of the one in current Internet.