On the benefits and feasibility of incentive based routing infrastructure

Abstract

Routing on the Internet today is as much about money as it is traffic. The business relationships of an ISP largely dictate its routing policy and drive the work of its engineers. In today's routing mechanism, this leads to a number of well-known pathologies. This structure is further challenged by the emergence of user-directed routing. This paper explores these challenges and argues for the introduction of explicit incentives (prices) into the routing fabric of the Internet. We argue that doing so addresses limitations of the current system that are significant today and will only be exacerbated by user-directed routing. To support this claim, we describe the benefits and properties of incentive-based routing frameworks and demonstrate how such frameworks can be applied to a number of routing architectures, including BGP.