METHOD AND SYSTEM FOR OPTIMIZING ROUTING THROUGH MULTIPLE AVAILABLE INTERNET ROUTE PROVIDERS

A method and system (100) for optimizing routing traffic to a destination wh en multiple routes are available. A performance monitoring and inference component (102) measures the performance of the available paths to a large s et of subnetworks, and uses those measurements to infer the performance of all available paths to an even larger set of subnetworks. A routing optimization component (104) uses a cost function that assigns a cost to a routing table based on information from component (102), and other path characteristics, a nd further uses a minimization methodology to find a routing table with a very low cost, as defined by the cost function. A BGP bridge (106) takes the routing table generated by optimization component (104) and communicates tha t information to the routers (116) using BGP, thereby ensuring that routers (116) will route traffic (108) in accordance with the routing table.