Watching Data Streams Toward a Multi-Homed Sink Under Routing Changes Introduced by a BGP Beacon

Abstract. Certain popular metrics have been used to reflect the instability of the Internet control plane, such as the volume and duration of BGP updates. However, it is unclear whether there is a direct relationship between those metrics and the data plane performance, especially as the Internet is becoming more densely connected and many networks become multi-homed. To clarify this, we measured data streams from a number of PlanetLab nodes toward a sink behind a multi-homed BGP Beacon, which can introduce scheduled BGP routing changes to potentially affect the performance of those data streams. In particular, as an important first step, we measured the delay, drop, jitter, and reordering of these data streams and compare them against the volume and duration of BGP updates. We found these data streams were only slightly affected and there is little correlations between these selected metrics from the two planes. Further work includes the correlation of the data plane performance with other control plane metrics while considering more types of routing changes