# An Architecture to Manage Incoming Traffic of Inter-Domain Routing Using OpenFlow Networks
## 6 Further Discussion
### The Proposed Architecture in the Internet  
To investigate the potential of the proposed architecture on the Internet, the CAIDA's database [52] was used to rank the ASes that provide transit to other ASes. The ranking was based on the _Customer Cone_ metric, which measures the number of direct and indirect customers of a given AS. The data for ranking the ASes was based on the _Customer Cone_ metric and was extracted from the topological data collected by CAIDA and BGP routing in June 2016. A total of 54,772 ASes comprised the dataset used.  
Thus, the first ten ASes in this ranking were selected and the number of ASes in their _Customer Cone_ were measured. Figure 13 depicts the potential of the proposed architecture in the Internet. The first 10 ASes in the ranking had an expressive quantity of direct or indirect customer relationships that could allow those customers to use the benefits of the deployment of the proposed architecture. Therefore, if one of those 10 ASes provided network services to control the inbound management of network traffic to its customer in the cone, those customer ASes could explore the path diversity of the Internet by using an _AS app_, as shown in the previous section.  
Furthermore, the proposed architecture acted in the BGP decision process and allows an AS that deployed this technology to offload its control for customer ASes. Next, a customer could manage inbound traffic by applying control mechanisms for network traffic toward its prefixes. The premise was that stub ASes would be willing to have that control and eventually could establish new relationships to transit ASes on the Internet.  
This type of relationship, where any AS can create a relationship with any other AS, is very difficult in the current Internet architecture. The benefits for the customers' ASes is the appropriate management of their inbound network traffic and for the transit ASes to provide new network value-added services. Obviously, the offload of control from the transit AS would hardly be available for free and will probably provide those new network services if and only if it had some political or financial incentives. Thereby, a transit AS that executes the proposed architecture could explore the new routing services economically and hence increase its profit that would be reachable via collaboration among ASes or due payment. Therefore, a new economy plane for the Internet [53] could emerge and the financial appeal of the proposed architecture is the incentive to transform and evolve the inter-domain environment [3].  
Besides having more control of the inbound network traffic, increasing control in the inter-domain routing could also be beneficial for the security of the Internet. For example, it is well known that the mitigation of Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) is more effective when applying defense mechanisms as close as possible to the source of the attack [54]. As the detection is more precise in the AS suffering a DDoS attack, it can respond by expanding its defense mechanism through other ASes. This will have the potential to inhibit the occurrence of DDoS once the defense mechanism can be expanded to being as close as possible to the source of the attack. Future works will focus on mitigating DDoS flooding attacks with the proposed architecture.