Chinese bgp metering story

Paolo Lucente pl+list at pmacct.net
Sat Dec 19 11:27:10 UTC 2009


On Fri, Dec 18, 2009 at 10:09:32PM -0600, James Hess wrote:
> On Fri, Dec 18, 2009 at 1:24 PM, Jonny Martin <jonny at pch.net> wrote:
> ..
> > modified if need be - to achieve this. ?Mixing billing with the reachability
> > information signalled through BGP just doesn't seem like a good idea.
> 
> Indeed not..  but it might offer one advantage, if  it was mandatory
> for any such tarrif/cost to be advertised there to be valid, and  in
> the form of an  ancillary BGP route attribute,  rather than buried in
> some  500,000 page  treaty that forces all ISPs to decipher it and
> try to figure out what their liabilities are.
> 
> Mainly because it makes any tarrif very visible, and easily understood.
> and offers an easy ability to automatically make decisions like
> discard reachability information that has any billing labels or
> "strings" attached to it, or has a cost greater than $X per million
> packets  listed for 'source'...  and easily allows an ISP to  replace
> the  next hop with null  when a tarrif option has been listed, or use
> only a route not subject to tarrif.

I concur. Such visibility is efficient and drives simplification and
automation from a data mining perspective, when analyzing accounting
information.

In such context, some care is required. Reachability information is
destination based. Mixing accounting (ie. NetFlow) and reachability
(ie. BGP) information is of good value for traffic delivered out of
a routing domain but not for traffic received, ie. reverse reachability
lookups can be a way although they are not truly deterministic due to
routing asymmetries; a mix of ingress measurements, lookup maps and
an export protocol supporting L2 information (ie. for same interface,
multiple peers scenarios) give way a better chance to resolve which
neighboring party is pulling which traffic into the observed domain.

Cheers,
Paolo





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