Information about the geographic locality of IP prefixes can be useful for understanding the issues related to IP address allocation, aggregation, and BGP routing table growth. In this study, we use traceroute data and geographic mappings of IP addresses to study the geographic properties of IP prefixes and their implications on Internet routing. We find that (1) IP prefixes may be too coarse-grained for expressing routing policies, (2) address allocation policies and the granularity of routing contribute significantly to routing table size, and (3) not considering the geographic diversity of contiguous prefixes may result in overestimating the opportunities for aggregation in the BGP routing table.

The complete paper is available at http://nms.lcs.mit.edu/~feamster/papers/imc05.pdf.

About the Presenter
Nick Feamster will join the College of Computing at Georgia Tech as an assistant professor in January 2006. He plans to receive his Ph.D. in computer science from MIT in 2005. He received his S.B. and M.Eng. degrees in Electrical Engineering and Computer Science from MIT in 2000 and 2001, respectively. His research focuses on many aspects of computer networking and networked systems, including the design, measurement, and analysis of network routing protocols, network security, anonymous communication systems, and adaptive streaming media protocols. His honors include award papers at the NSDI 2005 conference (fault detection in router configuration), Usenix Security 2002 (circumventing web censorship using Infranet), and Usenix Security 2001 (web cookie analysis).