Intelligent Route Control systems are tools that give the oportunity for multihomed ASes to modify the routes according to some performance criteria.

The paper "Avoiding Oscillations due to Intelligent Route Control Systems" written by Gao et al. at INFOCOM'06 shows, like the paper "Can Coexisting Overlays Inadvertenly Step on Each Other" (Keralapura et al., ICNP'05), that IRCs can lead to traffic oscilliations causing performances degradation.

The paper pin-points that the problem comes from two pitfalls: