**2.1 Asian Internet Interconnection Initiative (AIII)**

362 Earthquake Research and Analysis – Statistical Studies, Observations and Planning

from this huge natural disaster, which affected the global Internet, can be shared and can contribute to future Internet network management research. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first detailed study of network restoration after global network failures due to a

Although many natural disasters have occurred in the 21st century, until recently there had been no simultaneous outage of the global Internet backbone. However, the earthquake that occurred around Taiwan in 2006 made several Asia Pacific Research and Education (R&E) networks unreachable. At 21:26 and 21:34 on December 26th (UTC+9), 2006, there was a big undersea earthquake off the coast of Taiwan twice, which measured 7.1 and 6.9 respectively on the moment magnitude (Hanks & Kanamori, 1979). This earthquake caused significant damage to the undersea fiber cable systems in that area. Several ISPs were affected because each cable system is shared by multiple ISP's. This earthquake had the effect of dividing the Asia Pacific R&E networks into an eastern and a western group. The Asia Pacific R&E networks were, in particular, seriously damaged but were fully restored after several restoration steps, including automatic BGP re-routing, BGP policy changes, and switch port

The first step in recovery after the earthquake was taken automatically by BGP routers, which detoured traffic along redundant routes. In BGP routing, there are usually multiple redundant AS paths. Redundant BGP routes have served as backup paths but have provided poor quality connectivity, i.e., long round trip time (RTT). Because of the congestion on the narrow-bandwidth link that was subsequently reported, operators took manual control of traffic to improve communication quality. The second step was a traffic engineering process intended to prevent narrow-bandwidth links from filling up with detoured traffic. The operators changed the BGP routing policy related to the congested ASs. In spite of the routing-level restoration, a few institutions were still not directly connected to the R&E network community because they had only a single link to the network. For these single-link networks, the commodity link was used temporarily for connectivity. However, the commodity link was not stable and not sufficient to carry a huge amount of bandwidth or to provide next generation Internet service. To restore the single-

link networks, cable connection configurations at the switches were changed.

failures and recovery processes. Finally, we conclude the paper in Section 7.

The fiber break caused by the Taiwan earthquake raised restoration issues related to BGP rerouting. In such an emergency, the backup routes should be chosen based on available bandwidth and RTT. Since the fiber break required an urgent network recovery process, network operators configured re-routing based on their experience with bandwidth and RTT. From this experience, we have learned that redundant physical backup links and routes are important to providing bandwidth and connectivity and that the Quality-of-Service (QoS) after recovery is also important. From the viewpoint of restoration after network failures, there are still challenges that cannot be automatically overcome by network management systems. A systematic risk management plan that includes collaboration among operators of

The remainder of this chapter is as follows. In Section 2, the Asia Pacific R&E networks that were damaged by the earthquake or related events are introduced. Section 3 introduces the R&E connection especially in Asia Paicifc area and the issues caused by such inter-connectivity of R&E networks. Section 4 is a detailed report of the network failures that were observed after the earthquake. Section 5 describes the processes to restoring the disrupted communications in the area. Section 6 discusses what we have learned from the observation of the network

natural disaster.

reconfigurations, were taken.

the next-generation Internet is needed.

When AIII (Asian Internet Interconnection Initiative [AIII], n.d.) started in 1996, this project was the first next generation Internet R&E network in Asia. The basic idea of AIII is to provide Internet services via satellite. There are AIII members in TH, MY, ID, and SG (Tbl. 3). NP also recently joined the project. The AIII's major effort is to build up the access points of non-broadband networks. In Asia, it was very hard to complete the network over telephones lines, and preparing earth stations represented a better chance of accessing the Internet. The biggest drawback of this project is that the total bandwidth is limited to between 1.5 and 8 Mbps. In 1996, 2 Mbps was enough bandwidth to start research activities. Now, however, even 8 Mbps is insufficient for network technology research activities. These days, AIII concentrates on developing and deploying certain advanced technology on their network, for example, IPv6 unicast, IPv6 multicast, Uni Directional Link Routing (UDLR), and advanced TCP.
