Inefficient cross-border routing is a significant network challenge, particularly during peak periods such as e-commerce promotions, live international sporting events, and global corporate video conferencing. Decreased routing efficiency directly leads to increased latency, higher packet loss rates, and impaired user experience, ultimately impacting the normal operation of businesses' international operations.
Cross-border network data transmission involves multiple autonomous systems and international internet exchange points. Ideally, data packets should travel along the path with the shortest geographical distance and best network quality. However, in reality, routing choices are often influenced by commercial protocols, network congestion, and infrastructure limitations. Especially during peak periods, when massive data flows simultaneously onto limited international bandwidth channels, routing systems may be forced to choose suboptimal paths, causing data packets to pass through more relay nodes, significantly increasing transmission latency.
Physical distance is a fundamental factor affecting cross-border routing efficiency. The transmission speed of data in optical fibers is limited by physical laws, and long-distance transmission inevitably introduces a fundamental latency. For example, the physical latency of fiber optic transmission from Asia to the Americas exceeds 100 milliseconds. When this fundamental latency is compounded by inefficient routing, overall network performance deteriorates further. Actual measurement data shows that during peak hours, latency on some cross-border routes can increase by more than 50% compared to normal times, and packet loss rates can climb from below 1% to 5% or even higher.
Limitations of the BGP routing protocol are a technical reason for its inefficiency. As the backbone routing protocol of the Internet, BGP's routing strategy is primarily based on AS path length and policy configuration, rather than real-time network quality. Quality differences in peering protocols between network operators cause data packets to potentially take longer routes to avoid high-cost links. This detour is more prevalent during peak hours, sometimes resulting in abnormal situations where data packets repeatedly hop between two continents.
The carrying capacity and load balancing of submarine optical cables directly affect cross-border routing efficiency. Over 95% of global Internet traffic is transmitted through submarine optical cables, and the capacity and routing distribution of these cables are significantly uneven. During peak hours, bandwidth utilization on major intercontinental corridors can exceed 80%, at which point even slight network fluctuations can trigger a chain reaction, leading to frequent route switching and performance instability. While the newly built Asia-Europe and Trans-Pacific optical cable systems in recent years have alleviated capacity pressure to some extent, bottlenecks at key nodes still exist. Global cloud service providers and CDN providers are improving routing efficiency by building edge nodes and optimizing network layout. Caching content closer to users at edge nodes reduces reliance on cross-border backbone networks. Some cloud service providers are also ensuring stable network quality for their customers during peak hours by deploying dedicated submarine cables and purchasing priority passage rights.
Route protocol optimization and traffic scheduling are another important direction. Some large network operators have begun deploying BGP optimization controllers to adjust routing policies based on real-time network conditions. The combination of path servers and traffic engineering technologies enables more granular traffic scheduling, preventing overload of specific links during peak hours.
In the future, with the widespread adoption of new technologies such as IPv6 and SRv6, cross-border routing efficiency is expected to improve further. These technologies offer more possibilities for source routing, enabling packets to be transmitted along pre-calculated optimal paths, rather than relying entirely on routing decisions from intermediate nodes. Simultaneously, the application of artificial intelligence in network traffic prediction and anomaly detection will provide new solutions for routing optimization during peak hours.
Optimizing cross-border routing efficiency is an ongoing process that requires collaborative efforts from network operators, cloud service providers, and enterprise users. Only by building a smarter and more resilient global network architecture through technological innovation and resource investment can we ensure the service quality and user experience of various cross-border applications in the face of ever-increasing international data traffic.
