Analyzing the Internet stability in presence of disasters

Abstract

The Internet is now a critical infrastructure for the modern, information-based, e-Society. Stability and survivability of the Internet are thus important, especially in presence of catastrophic events which carry heavy societal and financial impacts. In this work, we analyze the stability of the inter-domain routing system during several large-scale catastrophic events that affected the connectivity of massive parts of the address space, with the objective of acquiring information about degradation of service and recovery capabilities. Results show that the Internet has maintained good responsiveness: service disruption has been contained and recovery times have been fast, even after catastrophic events. However, combining the view provided by the routing table and the view originated by the analysis of the BGP updates is not a trivial task, as such phenomena need to be analyzed at multiple time scales. © IFIP International Federation for Information Processing 2013.