Investigating the use of traffic engineering techniques on the Internet

• Leonardo Mendonça Federal University of Rio Grande (FURG) http://orcid.org/0009-0002-7476-9771
• Pedro Marcos Federal University of Rio Grande (FURG) https://orcid.org/0000-0001-7547-5674
• Vinícius Pinto Federal University of Rio Grande (FURG) https://orcid.org/0000-0002-6845-9358

DOI: https://doi.org/10.5753/errc.2024.4671

Abstract

This study investigates the behavior of Autonomous Systems (ASes) in applying two of the main inbound traffic engineering techniques: AS-Path Prepend (ASPP) and More Specific Prefix Announcements, focusing on IPv4 networks. We evaluated the use, proportion, and intensity of both techniques over 11 years (2014-2024), using routing data from the RouteViews project. Our results show that the fraction of ASes applying both ASPP and More Specific Prefix Announcements remained relatively stable, while the disaggregation of more specific prefixes decreased, reflecting a lower tendency for intense disaggregation, possibly in response to IPv4 address scarcity. Finally, we observed that ASPP is the more popular technique, but there is no significant correlation between the proportion of use of the two techniques.

Keywords: BGP, Interconnection, Traffic Engineering, Internet, Routing

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