"Selfish Routing"

Sat Feb 15 06:39:48 UTC 2003

Thus spake "Mikael Abrahamsson" <swmike at swm.pp.se>
> When I read the article I didnt recognize anything in it that correlated
> with my understanding as to how BGP et all works. Am I the only
> one who after reading it thought the author needs to cut back on
> whatever drugs he is taking?
>
> I have never seen any router "send test packets and time them" nor take
> congestion into account when doing routing decisions?

There are indeed commercial and in-house products which use probes and
traffic measurement to influence the BGP decision process.  Watch tarpit
logs for sites that ping every subnet on a regular schedule.  I hope this
doesn't catch on or all the pings may drown out real traffic...

As a general description of Internet routing, I agree it's laughable -- but
the technology does exist.

S