Meta-Peering: Automating ISP Peering Decision Process

Abstract

Peering between Internet Service Providers (ISPs) is playing an increasingly critical role in Internet traffic exchange. As content delivery networks continue to expand, major content ISPs are increasingly opting for peering arrangements over transit services to facilitate faster exchange of traffic. The satisfaction of the ISP pair and the longevity of the peering arrangement depend on the stability and performance of these peering relationships. We introduce meta-peering, a term which refers to the set of tools needed to help and automate the ISP peering process – starting with identifying a list of ISPs that are likely to peer, writing router rules to establish BGP sessions with them, and extending the service to monitor all these sessions for notifying any major outages or peering agreement violations. In this paper, we first make a thorough analysis of recent trends in ISP peering and describe how meta-peering can be implemented by integrating some of the existing tools. We mainly focus on instrumenting the automation of the peer selection process with an aim to identifying potential peering partners and peering locations to exchange traffic. Using these direct peering links greatly reduces energy consumption as traffic takes much shorter paths to their destinations, going through reduced number of intermediary devices (e.g., routers, switches) compared to elongated transit routes, consequently reducing the environmental impact. Utilizing PeeringDB and CAIDA datasets to identify possible peering points for ISP pairs, we consider ISPs’ internal policies to generate a list of acceptable peering contracts (APCs). We design two methodologies to rank order each ISP in the APC list and offer guidance on which ones would be stable and beneficial for the potential peers. A study of more than 3,000 ISP pairs (mostly active in North America) shows that our peer selection methods can attain around 80% accuracy in predicting peering relations.