Patent ID: 8050193

Claim:
A method for determining prospective peering partners for an internet service provider, comprising: gathering internet service provider's routing and traffic information; gathering additional routing information from sources other than the internet service provider; identifying uncovered target autonomous systems based on the internet service provider's routing and traffic information comprising: identifying all target autonomous systems for which the internet service provider provides accessibility, for each identified target autonomous system, identifying all paths from the internet service provider to the target autonomous system, and defining the target autonomous system as an uncovered target autonomous system if the following criteria are satisfied: the target autonomous system is not a peer, a customer or an upstream provider of the internet service provider, at least one path exists where the first autonomous system in the path is an upstream provider of the internet service provider, and no path exists where the first autonomous system in the path is a peer or a customer of the internet service provider; and wherein an uncovered target autonomous system is an autonomous system with non-null traffic from/to the internet service provider and that is reachable by the internet service provider only via a transit relationship; and identifying distinct paths from the internet service provider to the uncovered target autonomous systems among those previously identified based on the additional routing information; identifying intermediate autonomous systems along the identified paths; and determining at least a prospective peering partner for the internet service provider based on the identified intermediate autonomous systems.