The contents of this legacy page are no longer maintained nor supported, and are made available only for historical purposes.

Bibliography Details

H. Uijterwaal, "First analysis of the Beacon data" Nov 2002.

First analysis of the Beacon data
Authors: H. Uijterwaal
Published: IEPG meeting, Atlanta, GA, 2002
URL: http://www.ripe.net/ris/Talks/0211_IEPG/
http://www.ripe.net/ris/beacon.html
Entry Date: 2003-05-14
Background: A BGP beacon is an unused BGP prefix (unused in the sense that no traffic is ever forwarded to the prefix) that is intentionally announced and withdrawn periodically at known times. Announcements and withdrawals are usually spaced apart by two hours. Beacons are useful for studying BGP convergence, and the concept is related to Craig Labovitz's technique of injecting faults into the interdomain routing system as a means of studying convergence.
Datasets:
  • RIPE RIS BGP Beacons: one /24 prefix at each of 9 RIS route collectors
  • BGP updates in Oct 2002 caused by beacons; observed at RIS (?)
Results:
  • statistics on number of triggered BGP updates per event per peer:
    • observe more messages for withdrawals than for announcements
    • most announcements cause fewer than 5 update messages
    • most withdrawals cause fewer than 10 update messages
  • statistics on latency of first BGP update per event per peer; distributions are similar for announcements and withdrawals; centered at 30 seconds
  • statistics on latency of last BGP update per event per peer:
    • latency is higher for withdrawals than for announcements
    • latency for most announcements is under 100 seconds
    • latency for most withdrawals is under 300 seconds