Revisiting the Impact of Traffic Engineering Techniques on the Internet's Routing Table

This paper studies the effect of simple Traffic Engineering techniques on the size of the Internet’s default free routing table. Current best practises for traffic balancing in the Internet are based in disaggregating prefixes that cause an increase in size of the Internet’s core routing table. An algorithm to show the impact of these techniques on the growth of the routing table is proposed. This algorithm is applied on routing tables between January 2001 and December 2009 and the results are discussed. Finally an alternative architecture is proposed, which allows Traffic Engineering while keeping the Internet routing table size optimised.