Motivated by the difficulty of effecting fundamental change in the architecture of the Internet, in this paper, we study from a theoretical perspective the question of how individuals can join forces toward collective ventures. To that end, we draw on an elementary concept in Internet systems engineering, namely, that of incremental deployability, which we study mathematically and computationally. For example, we show that incremental deployability is at least as general a concept as the Nash equilibrium (in that the latter can be derived from the former). We then draw on this foundation to design and analyze institutional mechanisms that are not only promising to bootstrap emerging Internet architectures but they also have broader applications in social organization beyond its predominant market (and finance)-based character.
For example, @cite_39 show that the deployment of Secure-BGP can be facilitated by a pair of mechanisms, namely, (i) routing policies that prefer Internet paths safeguarded by Secure-BGP in partial deployment and (ii) offloading cryptography from autonomous systems without a customer (known as stub autonomous systems) to their providers. These techniques improve the incremental deployability of Secure-BGP, however, the incentive structure these techniques induce remains akin to the stag hunt, and, in fact, Gill propose concentrating peer pressure and regulatory efforts to a small fraction of core autonomous systems for their techniques to be effective in driving the growth of Secure-BGP. Our point, therefore, that, although such line of effort is certainly helpful to the adoption of emerging technologies it is not in general conclusive, remains.
@cite_39
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The delivery of IP traffic through the Internet depends on the complex interactions between thousands of autonomous systems (AS) that exchange routing information using the border gateway protocol (BGP). This paper investigates the topological structure of the Internet in terms of customer-provider and peer-peer relationships between autonomous systems, as manifested in BGP routing policies. We describe a technique for inferring AS relationships by exploiting partial views of the AS graph available from different vantage points. Next we apply the technique to a collection of ten BGP routing tables to infer the relationships between neighboring autonomous systems. Based on these results, we analyze the hierarchical structure of the Internet and propose a five-level classification of AS. Our characterization differs from previous studies by focusing on the commercial relationships between autonomous systems rather than simply the connectivity between the nodes.