I'm trying to understand what techniques/solutions are available to determine which AS's would make good peering partners. If we look at our Transit stream to our upstream provider, I had heard the following from someone and would like to get some other opinions:
When trying to identify good AS candidates for peering from your transit traffic stream. It would seem that distinguishing the ingress traffic by not only the next-hop AS but also by the next-next-hop AS (or by the complete AS path) so that you can identify which customer or peer of your transit provider might be a likely interesting new peer for you. However, due to the concept of BGP traffic in the internet being asymmetrically distributed. It is not possible to exactly determine the real AS path of incoming traffic. The only reliable information is about the next-hop and the origin AS. Assuming that traffic is mostly symmetrical it is possible to "estimate" the distribution of ingress traffic on AS paths. While this assumption is questionable it at least allows to find out one (or some) of the several "potential" intermediate" ASNs for a given origin ASNs.
Is the above statement OK, and what about egress analysis, would that not also provide useful as that information is more reliable?
-guy