Shedding Light on the Glue Logic of the Internet Routing Architecture Franck Le , Geoffrey G. Xie ¡ , Dan Pei , Jia Wang and Hui Zhang Carnegie Mellon University, ¡ Naval Postgraduate School, AT&T Labs - Research ABSTRACT Recent studies reveal that the routing structures of operational networks are much more complex than a simple BGP/IGP hierarchy, highlighted by the presence of many distinct instances of routing protocols. However, the glue (how routing protocol instances interact and exchange routes among themselves) is still little understood or studied. For example, although Route Redistribution (RR), the implementation of the glue in router software, has been used in the Internet for more than a decade, it was only recently shown that RR is extremely vulnerable to anomalies similar to the permanent route oscillations in BGP. This paper takes an important step toward understanding how RR is used and how fundamental the role RR plays in practice. We developed a complete model and associated tools for characterizing interconnections between routing instances based on analysis of router con guration data. We analyzed and characterized the RR usage in more than 1600 operational networks. The ndings are: (i) RR is
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