TY - GEN
T1 - Network heterogeneity and cascading failures ¿ an evaluation for the case of bgp vulnerability
AU - Doerr, C
AU - Smith, P
AU - Hutchison, D
PY - 2009
Y1 - 2009
N2 - Large-scale outages of computer networks, particularly the Internet, can have a significant impact on their users and society in general. There have been a number of theoretical studies of complex network structures that suggest that heterogeneous networks, in terms of node connectivity and load, are more vulnerable to cascading failures than those which are more homogeneous. In this paper, we describe early research into an investigation of whether this thesis holds true for vulnerabilities in the Internet¿s inter-domain routing protocol ¿ BGP ¿ in light of different network structures. Specifically, we are investigating the effects of BGP routers creating blackholes ¿ observed phenomena in the Internet in recent years. We describe our evaluation setup, which includes a bespoke topology generator that can fluidly create any topology configuration from the current scale-free AS-level to the investigated homogeneous graphs. We find that network homogeneity as suggested by theory does not protect the overall network from failures in practice, but instead may even be harmful to network operations.
AB - Large-scale outages of computer networks, particularly the Internet, can have a significant impact on their users and society in general. There have been a number of theoretical studies of complex network structures that suggest that heterogeneous networks, in terms of node connectivity and load, are more vulnerable to cascading failures than those which are more homogeneous. In this paper, we describe early research into an investigation of whether this thesis holds true for vulnerabilities in the Internet¿s inter-domain routing protocol ¿ BGP ¿ in light of different network structures. Specifically, we are investigating the effects of BGP routers creating blackholes ¿ observed phenomena in the Internet in recent years. We describe our evaluation setup, which includes a bespoke topology generator that can fluidly create any topology configuration from the current scale-free AS-level to the investigated homogeneous graphs. We find that network homogeneity as suggested by theory does not protect the overall network from failures in practice, but instead may even be harmful to network operations.
KW - conference contrib. refereed
KW - Conf.proc. > 3 pag
UR - http://www.springerlink.com/content/h66l67864133/?k=doerr
M3 - Conference contribution
SN - 978-3-642-10865-5
SP - 207
EP - 212
BT - Lecture Notes in Computer Science
A2 - s.n., null
PB - Springer
CY - s.l.
T2 - 4th IFIP TC 6 International Workshop, IWSOS 2009, Zurich, Switzerland.
Y2 - 9 December 2009 through 11 December 2009
ER -