Modeling BGP table fluctuations

Abstract

In this paper we develop a mathematical model to capture BGP table fluctuations. This provides the necessary foundations to study short- and long-term routing table growth. We reason that this growth is operationally critical for network administrators who need to gauge the amount of memory to install in routers as well as being a potential deciding factor in determining when the Internet community will run out of IPv4 address space. We demonstrate that a simple model using a simple arrival process with heavy tailed service times is sufficient to reproduce BGP dynamics including the “spiky” characteristics of the original trace data. We derive our model using a classification technique that separates newly added or removed prefixes, short-term spikes and long-term stable prefixes. We develop a model of non-stable prefixes and show it has similar properties in their magnitude and duration to those observed in recorded BGP traces.