This episode of PING features Thomas Alfroy and Thomas Holterbach from the University of Strasbourg, talking about bgproutes.io — a new approach to Border Gateway Protocol (BGP) data collection and analysis.
We’ve featured bgproutes.io on PING before, when we discussed GILL and DFOH with Professor Cristal Pelsser from Louvain University. At that stage, the project was in an early stage, and we focused on the Machine Learning and approaches to selecting the ‘Most valuable Vantage Point’ or MVP in the data sources available.
This time, the two Thomases discuss the operational deployment of the service, how they have designed the system to provide fast visibility to data in a three-month window, and an API for the selection of prefixes and origin-AS of interest to show the BGP transactions seen in the wild. They’ve been designing ‘dashboards’ to show both the data and a sense of what logic determined the inferences made about the data.
bgproutes.io has been written to process the newer BGP Monitoring Protocol (BMP), which provides visibility of the discrete states of the individual BGP speakers who peer at the BMP collection point. For an Internet Exchange Point (IXP), this means a single BMP feed can deliver 50 or more distinct BGP perspectives. This capability has enabled the project to expand to more than 300 BGP vantage points worldwide.
The service is complementary to those from The University of Oregon’s RouteViews or the RIPE RIS project, and includes data from these sources, along with PCH and CGTF.
Thomas Alfroy presented at the Sydney SIGCOMM meeting, where the system was described in the 2024 SIGCOMM ‘best paper’ award-winning research: “The Next Generation of BGP Data Collection Platforms“. Thomas Holterbach is no stranger to the APNIC community, having spent time at the IIJ Research Laboratory in Tokyo.
Read more about bgproutes.io on the APNIC Blog and on the web:
- bgproutes.io (project website)
- bgproutes.io: A next-generation BGP data collection platform (APNIC Blog)
- [Podcast] DFOH, MVP, and GILL: New ways of looking at BGP
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