An Economic Side-Effect for Prefix Deaggregation

Abstract

The injection of artificially fragmented prefixes through BGP is a widely used traffic engineering technique. In this paper we examine one particular economic side-effect of deaggregation, namely the impact on the transit traffic bill. We show that the use of more-specific prefixes has a traffic stabilization side-effect which translates into a decrease of the transit traffic bill. We propose an analytical model in order to quantify the impact of deaggregation on the transit costs. We validate our results by means of simulations and through the extensive analysis of real BGP routing information data.