Geographic Locality of IP Prefixes

Information about the geographic locality of IP prefixes can be useful for understanding the issues related to IP address allocation, aggregation, and BGP routing table growth. In this paper, we use traceroute data and geographic mappings of IP addresses to study the geographic properties of IP prefixes and their implications on Internet routing. We find that (1) IP prefixes may be too coarse-grained for expressing routing policies, (2) address allocation policies and the granularity of routing contribute significantly to routing table size, and (3) not considering the geographic diversity of contiguous prefixes may result in overestimating the opportunities for aggregation in the BGP routing table.