Dear Ado,

   the term "implicit withdrawal" applies to a BGP update U_2 that comes to a BGP speaker from the same peer P that sent a previous update U_1. When the peer P sends the second update U_2, the meaning is that the previous update U_1 is implicitly withdrawn by P and replaced with U_2. In other words, the sequence U_1, U_2 has the same effect of U_1, Withdrawal, U_2.    
   The four BGP announcements that you list in your email do not come all from the same peer of router 192.65.185.40. However, the third announcement (FROM: 192.65.185.144, AS_PATH: 6893 3561 209 297) is an implicit withdrawal of the first (FROM: 192.65.185.144, AS_PATH: 6893 8938 1 297). There is only one implicit withdrawal in the sequence.
   After all four announcements are received by router 192.65.185.40, router 192.65.185.40 has to choose its best route to prefix 192.152.102.0/24. The choice is among the 2nd, 3rd and 4th route, since the 1st announcement is implicitly withdrawn by the 3rd.

Best,
Maurizio

On 10/11/2015 12:26 PM, Ado Maja wrote:
Dear all,
I am trying to account for all implicit withdrawal messages within a certain period of time looking at BGP update messages collected at rrc, Ripe. 
Implicit Withdrawal Definition: If the sender announces a route to a currently reachable address and the new route is identical to the current route, this is a duplicate announcement. Otherwise, the sender is replacing the current route with a new route and this is an implicit withdrawal. (Wang et al. in the "Observation and Analysis of BGP iBehavior under Stress")
 
What I am trying to understand is how do I count implicit withdrawals? If for example, I have 4 BGP messages shown below that have same IP address and different AS-PATH attribute, how many implicit withdrawals do I have? Is it 3? If I look at consecutive messages that have same IP address and different AS-PATH attribute the result would be 3 (I compare first to the second, second to the third and third to the fourth – assuming they have same IP address and different AS-PATH I increment implicit withdrawals). But I have come across a solution that takes a first message and compares it to the rest of the messages. Than second message compares to the rest of the messages. And lastly compares the third to the fourth. In this case number of implicit withdrawals is 6. Please advise.
Thanks for your help.
TIME: 2001-9-16 00:00:06
TYPE: BGP4MP/BGP4MP_MESSAGE AFI_IP
FROM: 192.65.185.144
TO: 192.65.185.40
BGP PACKET TYPE: UPDATE
ORIGIN: IGP
AS_PATH: 6893 8938 1 297
NEXT_HOP: 192.65.185.144
ANNOUNCED: 192.152.102.0/24
 
TIME: 2001-9-16 00:00:18
TYPE: BGP4MP/BGP4MP_MESSAGE AFI_IP
FROM: 192.65.184.3
TO: 192.65.185.40
BGP PACKET TYPE: UPDATE
ORIGIN: IGP
AS_PATH: 513 10764 6509 297
NEXT_HOP: 192.65.185.9
ANNOUNCED: 192.152.102.0/24
 
TIME: 2001-9-16 00:00:36
TYPE: BGP4MP/BGP4MP_MESSAGE AFI_IP
FROM: 192.65.185.144
TO: 192.65.185.40
BGP PACKET TYPE: UPDATE
ORIGIN: IGP
AS_PATH: 6893 3561 209 297
NEXT_HOP: 192.65.185.144
ANNOUNCED: 192.152.102.0/24
 
TIME: 2001-9-16 00:00:44
TYPE: BGP4MP/BGP4MP_MESSAGE AFI_IP
FROM: 192.65.185.130
TO: 192.65.185.40
BGP PACKET TYPE: UPDATE
ORIGIN: IGP
AS_PATH: 559 8933 6509 297
NEXT_HOP: 192.65.185.130
ANNOUNCED: 192.152.102.0/24


-- 
Maurizio "Titto" Patrignani
Dipartimento di Ingegneria, Universita' Roma Tre
Tel +39.06.57333233, Fax +39.06.57333612
http://www.dia.uniroma3.it/~patrigna