A Study of Hinge-Transmit Property of BGP Routing System

From the aspect of inter-domain routing security, it is important to identify the critical ASes which transmit a large fraction of data traffic. By analyzing the BGP routing process under the control of routing polices and evaluating a series of Transmit factors, we realize that BGP routing system has a Hinge-Transmit property. It indicates that Tier-1 AS set is the hinge of the Internet, transmitting a large fraction of data traffic to the whole network; a subset of Tier-1 AS set with a special topological location (core AS set) is the hinge of data delivery paths to a specified destination, transmitting a large fraction of data traffic from any source to the destination. These hinge ASes are the keys of Internet security and should be protected carefully. Finally, we verify the result by Route Views routing tables.