Developing an Original Theoretical Framework for Resilient Multi-Path Routing in Nigerian Internet Exchange Point Networks

Nigeria's internet routing infrastructure concentrated at the Lagos Internet Exchange Point is vulnerable to cascading failures and international connectivity outages from cable breaks, power failures, and cyber attacks, and the theoretical characterisation of resilient multi-path routing strategies for the specific topology of Nigerian IXP interconnections has not been established. This study developed an original theoretical framework for resilient multi-path routing in the Nigerian IXP network architecture, contributing to both network resilience theory and Nigerian internet infrastructure policy. A topological analysis of the Nigerian IXP interconnection graph was conducted using publicly available BGP routing data from RIPE NCC, AS-level traceroute measurements from CAIDA Ark probes positioned in Lagos and Abuja, and interviews with eight Nigerian internet exchange operators. The analysis revealed that 73.4 percent of Nigerian autonomous systems had single-path international transit dependencies and that the failure of three critical AS nodes would increase mean path length by 4.2 hops for 67 percent of Nigerian internet traffic. An original Resilience-Constrained Multi-Path Routing Protocol (RCMP) was theorised, extending MPLS traffic engineering with a novel Joint Path Diversity and Bandwidth Efficiency objective function derived from percolation theory bounds on network connectivity. RCMP was evaluated on the empirical Nigerian IXP topology under single and cascading failure scenarios simulated using network shadow experiments. Under single AS failure, RCMP reduced average traffic rerouting delay by 68 percent versus standard OSPF-TE. Under three-node cascading failure, RCMP maintained 84 percent of pre-failure throughput versus 31 percent for OSPF-TE.