Understanding Partial Reachability in the Internet Core

2026-01-17

AI Summary

This study addresses the widespread yet often overlooked issue of partial reachability in the Internet core, driven by political, architectural, and commercial factors and frequently missed by conventional “outage”-centric perspectives. The work proposes a connectivity-based definition of the Internet core and identifies two key phenomena: “peninsulas” (persistent partial connectivity) and “islands” (complete disconnection). Leveraging large-scale measurement data from Trinocular and RIPE Atlas, the authors design a cross-platform validation algorithm, with accuracy assessed using CAIDA Ark. Over three years of observation, peninsula events outnumber traditional outages, exhibiting noise levels 5–9.7× higher than those reported by RIPE DNSmon operational events. Notably, 90% of peninsula duration is dominated by just 7% of long-lived events, revealing that partial reachability is both more prevalent and less amenable to control by any single entity.

Technology Category

• Application Domains: Internet of Things, Sensor Networks & Smart Cities
• Planning, Routing, and Scheduling: Optimization of Spatio-temporal Systems
• Reasoning under Uncertainty: Other Foundations of Reasoning under Uncertainty

Application Category

• Responsible Web: Measurement, analysis, and circumvention of Web censorship
• Graph Algorithms and Modeling for the Web: Algorithms and analysis for incomplete, noisy, or partially observed Web-related graphs
• Web Mining and Content Analysis: Web measurements

Abstract

Routing strives to connect all the Internet, but compete: political pressure threatens routing fragmentation; architectural changes such as private clouds, carrier-grade NAT, and firewalls make connectivity conditional; and commercial disputes create partial reachability for days or years. This paper suggests *persistent, partial reachability is fundamental to the Internet* and an underexplored problem. We first *derive a conceptual definition of the Internet core* based on connectivity, not authority. We identify *peninsulas*: persistent, partial connectivity; and *islands*: when computers are partitioned from the Internet core. Second, we develop algorithms to observe each across the Internet, and apply them to two existing measurement systems: Trinocular, where 6 locations observe 5M networks frequently, and RIPE Atlas, where 13k locations scan the DNS roots frequently. Cross-validation shows our findings are stable over *three years of data*, and consistent with as few as 3 geographically-distributed observers. We validate peninsulas and islands against CAIDA Ark, showing good recall (0.94) and bounding precision between 0.42 and 0.82. Finally, our work has broad practical impact: we show that *peninsulas are more common than Internet outages*. Factoring out peninsulas and islands as noise can *improve existing measurement systems*; their ``noise''is $5\times$ to $9.7\times$ larger than the operational events in RIPE's DNSmon. We show that most peninsula events are routing transients (45\%), but most peninsula-time (90\%) is due to a few (7\%) long-lived events. Our work helps inform Internet policy and governance, with our neutral definition showing no single country or organization can unilaterally control the Internet core.

Problem

• partial reachability
• Internet core
• network connectivity
• routing fragmentation
• peninsulas and islands

Innovation

• partial reachability
• Internet core
• peninsulas
• network measurement
• connectivity