Inter-domain traffic management in and evolving Internet peering eco-system

Operators of the Autonomous Systems (ASes) composing the Internet must deal with constant traffic growth, while striving to reduce the overall cost-per-bit and keep an acceptable quality of service. These challenges have motivated ASes to evolve their infrastructure from basic interconnectivity strategies, using a couple transit providers and a few settlement-free peers, to employ geographical scoped transit services (e.g. partial transit) and multiplying their peering efforts. Internet Exchange Points (IXPs), facilities allowing the establishment of sessions to multiple networks using the same infrastructure, have hence become central entities of the Internet. Although the benefits of a diverse interconnection strategy are manifold, it also encumbers the inter-domain Traffic Engineering process and potentially increases the effects of incompatible interests with neighboring ASes. To efficiently manage the inter-domain traffic under such challenges, operators should rely on monitoring systems and computer supported decisions. This thesis explores the IXP-centric inter-domain environment, the managing obstacles arising from it, and proposes mechanisms for operators to tackle them. The thesis is divided in two parts. The first part examines and measures the global characteristics of the inter-domain ecosystem. We characterize several IXPs around the world, comparing them in terms of their number of members and the properties of the traffic they exchange. After highlighting the problems arising from the member overlapping among IXPs, we introduce remote peering, an interconnection service that facilitates the connection to multiple IXPs. We describe this service and measure its adoption in the Internet. In the second part of the thesis, we take the position of the network operators. We detail the challenges surrounding the control of inter-domain traffic, and introduce an operational framework aimed at facilitating its management. Subsequently, we examine methods that peering coordinators and network engineers can use to plan their infrastructure investments, by quantifying the benefits of new interconnections. Finally, we delve into the effects of conflicting business objectives among ASes. These conflicts can result in traffic distributions that violate the (business) interests of one or more ASes. We describe these interest violations, differentiating their impact on the ingress and egress traffic of a single AS. Furthermore, we develop a warning system that operators can use to detect and rank them. We test our warning system using data from two real networks, where we discover a large number of interest violations. We thus stress the need for operators to identify the ones having a larger impact on their network.This work has been supported by IMDEA Networks Institute.Programa Oficial de Doctorado en Ingeniería TelemáticaPresidente: Jordi Domingo-Pascual.- Secretario: Francisco Valera Pintor.- Vocal: Víctor Lópe