The Border Gateway Protocol (BGP) holds the Internet together to form a coherent network. The BGP routing table can tell us a lot about the dyamics of the Internet. Not only is this related to the size of memory needed to store the routing tables in routing hardware, but the rates of growth can tell us about the dynamics of network growth and the relative level of network growth in IPv6 as compared to IPv4. The dynamics of network convergence can also tell us how the BGP routing infrastructure is coping with scaling pressures. In this presentation we will look closely at the BGP routing table across 2023, and make some prejections as to its likely size and dynamic properties in the coming five years.

Geoff Huston is the Chief Scientist at APNIC, the Regional Internet Registry for the Asia Pacific. Prior to this role he was the Chief Internet Architect at Telstra in Australia. He has served on the Internet Architecture Board and chaired a number of IETF Working Groups. His current research interests include routing, security and the DNS.