Route Distribution Incentives

We present an incentive model for route distribution in the context of path vector routing protocols and focus on the Border Gateway Protocol (BGP). We model BGP route distribution and computation using a game in which a BGP speaker advertises its prefix to its direct neighbors promising them a reward for further distributing the route deeper into the network. The result of this cascaded route distribution is an advertised prefix and hence reachability of the BGP speaker. We first study the convergence of BGP protocol dynamics to a unique outcome tree in the defined game. We then study the existence of equilibria in the full information game considering competition dynamics focusing on the simplest two classes of graphs: 1) the line (and the tree) graphs which involve no competition, and 2) the ring graph which involves competition.