Self-organization of internet paths

The Internet consists of a constantly evolving complex hierarchical architecture where routers are grouped into autonomous systems (ASes) that interconnect to provide global connectivity. Routing is generally performed in a decentralized fashion, where each router determines the route to the destination based on the information gathered from neighboring routers. Consequently, the impact of a route update broadcasted by one router may affect many other routers, causing an avalanche of update messages broadcasted throughout the network. In this paper we analyze an extensive dataset with measurements on Internet routes between a set of highly stable testboxes for a period of five years. The measurements provide insight into the coherence between routing events in the Internet and we argue that the routing dynamics exhibit self-organized criticality (SOC). The SOC property provides an explanation for the power-law behavior that we observe in the operational times of routes.