This episode of PING features Thomas Alfroy and Thomas Holterbach from the University of Strasbourg, talking about bgproutes.io - A new approach to 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 focussed 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, and how they have designed the system to provide fast visibility to data in a 3 month window, and an API for 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. So, considering an IX this means that a single feed can supply 50 or more distinct views of BGP. This has permitted the project to grow to over 300 points of view worldwide.

The service is complementary to those from University of Oregon 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 spend 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