Question about AS Origin changes

[joey.liuyq at gmail.com (Yaoqing(Joey) Liu)]

Hi NANOG list,

I am wondering if anyone can give me possible reasons for some uncommon BGP
origin change activity.  What we see is that sometimes the origin for a
prefix seems to change from a customer AS to it upstream provider and back.
 In many instances the prefix simply switches back and forth for hours or
even days and sometimes very rapidly .  Below I?m including an example of
some of the activities I see.

Prefix 202.83.96/20 on border router 154.11.98.225(AS 852)

At 14:10:56 Dec 04 2010, the BGP path with AS18106 as the origin
At 14:11:57,  the BGP path with AS9255 as the origin
At 14:14:27, the BGP path with AS18106 as the origin.

Thanks,
Yaoqing