The Tragedy of the Internet Routing Commons

Abstract

Over the last years, the research community has been deeply concerned about the scalability issues that the Internet routing is facing. In this paper we study the economic incentives for the Global Routing Table (GRT) explosive growth by considering a commons model in which the GRT is a public resource. In particular, we analyze the motivations the Autonomous Systems (ASes) have for deaggregating their assigned address blocks. We evaluate the efficiency of the global routing system, the properties of the game equilibria and we examine its relation to the optimal social welfare point of the considered game setup. We prove that the GRT, just like any common natural resource, “remorselessly generates tragedy”, following Hardin’s game theoretic analysis on the tragedy of the commons. Finally, we introduce in the model a payment mechanism that aims to avoid the tragedy of the Internet routing commons.