Toward Internet Emergency Response via Reconfiguration in Internet eXchange Points

The Internet has become a key infrastructure for global information society. However, the availability of the Internet can be substantially challenged when a disaster strikes, because in such cases the recovery process as of today is largely manual, slow and inefficient. Recognizing that a key issue for obtaining availability is to find the connectivity to the lost destinations, we exploit Internet eXchange Points (IXPs) wherein multiple Autonomous Systems (ASes) exchange traffic. The core of this paper is to present IER, a first Internet Emergency Response design, to substantially speedup the recovery of the Internet availability after an emergency using IXPs. We introduce a detailed IER framework including the routing resource identification, resource allocation mechanisms as well as network reconfiguration strategies. We extensively evaluate our resource allocation mechanisms using synthetic data generated from realistic Internet AS topology and IXP dataset. Our results suggest that our resource allocation process is fast and is able to deliver reasonably good recovery rates in a series of settings, for example, in a major emergency, it can figure out how to recover 2.4+ million disconnected AS pairs within 11 seconds.