​ISPs (Internet Service Providers) typically operate as commercial ASes (Autonomous Systems) and obtain revenue by delivering IP (Internet Protocol) traffic of their customers. In particular, the provider-free ASes – which reach the entire Internet without paying anyone for the traffic delivery – sell IP transit to numerous other ASes. IP prefix deaggregation gives the deaggregator some control over Internet traffic flows but increases the memory requirements of IP routers. This paper offers a novel economic perspective on prefix deaggregation. In particular, we investigate whether provider-free ASes have financial incentives to deaggregate prefixes in order to attract additional IP traffic of their customers. Our study combines analysis with extensive simulations seeded by actual data. Using a realistic AS-level Internet topology, we derive a traffic-matrix model and then conduct simulations in our optimized version of C-BGP. The results show that a provider-free AS has strong incentives for traffic attraction by prefix deagregation, even if all provider-free ASes deaggregate prefixes simultaneously, or if other ASes filter out the deaggregated prefixes. We also demonstrate that the financial benefits from the attracted traffic significantly outweigh the extra router-memory costs imposed by the prefix deaggregation

The conference will be conducted in English