Detecting Peering Infrastructure Outages in the Wild
Wednesday, October 4, 2017, 12:00-1:00 pm 
Abstract
Peering infrastructures, namely, colocation facilities and Internet
exchange points, are located in every major city, have hundreds
of network members, and support hundreds of thousands of interconnections
around the globe. These infrastructures are well
provisioned and managed, but outages have to be expected, e.g.,
due to power failures, human errors, attacks, and natural disasters.
However, little is known about the frequency and impact of outages
at these critical infrastructures with high peering concentration.
In this paper, we develop a novel and lightweight methodology
for detecting peering infrastructure outages. Our methodology relies
on the observation that BGP communities, announced with
routing updates, are an excellent and yet unexplored source of
information allowing us to pinpoint outage locations with high
accuracy. We build and operate a system that can locate the epicenter
of infrastructure outages at the level of a building and track
the reaction of networks in near real-time. Our analysis unveils
four times as many outages as compared to those publicly reported
over the past five years. Moreover, we show that such outages have
significant impact on remote networks and peering infrastructures.
Our study provides a unique view of the Internet’s behavior under
stress that often goes unreported.
Bio
Ramakrishna Padmanabhan is a PhD candidate interested in measuring networks: their topology, connectivity and performance. His current research focusses upon measuring residential Internet connectivity using active probes: how to detect outages using active probes and how to account for errors introduced by the use of active probes.
This talk is organized by Ramakrishna Padmanabhan