Modeling and Automating ISP Peering Decision Process: Willingness and Stability

Md. Ibrahim Ibne Alam, Shahzeb Mustafa, Koushik Kar, Murat Yuksel

Abstract: The importance of peering in traffic exchange be-tween ISPs is rapidly increasing. With continuing growth in content delivery networks, large content ISPs are becoming increasingly inclined to exchange traffic through peering rela-tionships rather than using transit services. The stability and performance of these peering relationships dictate the satisfaction of the ISP pair and the durability of the peering. Quantification of various parameters that indicate the efficiency of peering contracts is however difficult. From the perspective of any ISP pair, there are two key decisions to be made: whether to peer or not, and at which location(s) to peer. We propose two metrics, peering willingness and peering stability, towards quantifying an ISP’s decision to peer at a location with another ISP, and the stability of that relationship. We compute these metrics using publicly available data to characterize peering relationships for different ISP pair types. We observe that peering between Content and Access ISP pairs results in the most stable and efficient relationship.