Abstract

The growth of the Internet has increased the size and complexity of routing tables, which are integral to the global Internet infrastructure. This paper presents a comprehensive decade-long time-series study of the growth and stability of routing tables across multiple Autonomous Systems (ASs) and their inter-domain routing. Using decade-long archival data from the Border Gateway Protocol (BGP), we examine the fundamental inter-domain routing and stability phenomena, outliers, and the overarching trends. We then apply advanced statistical ARIMA and Prophet modeling, among other methods, to growth and recurring patterns of instability. In particular, we are interested in the phenomena of tiered acceleration and the persistence of chronic volatility due to infrastructure tech policy shifts, route flapping, misconfigurations, and prefix hijacks. The work also determines the efficiency of core routers' stored program control memory and circuits, computation, and memory trade-off bounded by the granularity of routing versus convergence time, on the dynamics of core routing tables. Internal churn, collapsible prefix lifetime, and update frequency determine the system's current operational health. The potential benefits of routing table aggregation, the tendency toward prefix de-aggregation, and the implementation of mitigation practices such as BGP Route Flap Damping and RPKI DS are called into question. The recommendation this paper ends with is to make the Internet routing table more stable and scalable through predictive monitoring and policy-driven traffic engineering. The significant contribution of the research is to give network operators, researchers, and protocol designers the information about the time-evolving routing architecture of the world, which will help in designing more resilient routing systems for the Internet.