Towards an Automated Investigation of the Impact of BGP Routing Changes on Network Delay Variations

Understanding fluctuations in network performance is important as many applications, including streaming, conferencing, gaming, and financial transactions, rely on timely delivery of data. Awareness of the effect of routing changes on network delays is key to this understanding, but research in this area is often based on empirical observations that cannot be easily extended to everyday network scenarios. We study the relationship between BGP routing changes and round-trip times (RTTs), bringing several contributions: 1) an automated methodology that exploits state-of-the-art statistical methods to determine if a routing change caused a significant RTT variation; 2) an application of our methodology on massive RIPE RIS and RIPE Atlas data sets, showing its effectiveness in the wild (for example, at least 72.5% of the unique routing changes were consistently associated with an RTT increase — or decrease — in all their occurrences); 3) various a-posteriori analyses leading to interesting findings for several practical applications.