The presentation starts with a brief discussion of the Internet design philosophy and the current hierarchical organization of the Internet into autonomous systems. Then, we describe the current architecture of major tier 1 IP backbones, providing a historical perspective on various aspects such as link upgrades, evolution of Points of Presence (POP), etc. This description is illustrated with examples from Sprint's IP backbone networks. We shortly discuss routing policies and practices covering issues such as intra-domain routing, BGP configurations, relationships with other ASes and traffic engineering practices. Next, we will explain the backbone design philosophy encompassing issues such as overprovisioning, QOS, fault tolerance and manageability.
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