Noisy Neighbours: Keep the Neighbourhood Quiet

The Border Gateway Protocol (BGP) is a crucial inter-domain routing protocol that uses update messages to enable Autonomous Systems (ASes) to share network reachability information. Typically, ASes should only trigger update messages to reflect configuration changes and link failures for optimal path selection. However, we have identified recurring patterns of high-frequency repeated updates without any topological changes, which consume unnecessary resources of the route collectors for archiving and storage, and complicate downstream analysis. Although the phenomenon of noisy BGP peers and prefixes is known, current work has not quantified its scope and characteristics. This study fills this gap and analyzes over 80 billion update messages from multiple RouteViews collectors spanning several years. We identify and characterize high-frequency repeated updates driven by a small fraction of sessions and prefixes. For instance, fewer than 2\% of the prefixes accounted for over 90\% of update messages in some BGP update traces.