2025-09-30 –, Zaal
The public data shared by BGP route collection platforms such as RIPE RIS, RouteViews, and bgproutes.io is essential for our community to monitor the global Internet.
These platforms establish BGP sessions with operational routers, collect the advertised routes, and store them in public databases accessible to everyone. Beyond academic research, this data is extremely valuable for network operators. It powers the tools they rely on daily, such as BGP looking glasses, hijack detection systems, AS ranking services, and more.
In our lightning talk, we will present a new approach to gathering routing data using the BGP Monitoring Protocol (BMP). We believe BMP is a potential game changer: While traditional collection platforms rely solely on BGP sessions, which only reveal the best routes from a single BGP router, BMP can provide much more. It enables the collection of routes from all peers of a monitored router and offers visibility into multiple stages of the BGP decision process (e.g., before and after applying filters).
We will introduce bgproutes.io, explain how BMP enables richer and more useful data collection, and show how operators can connect to the platform and contribute their data to the community via BMP.
We are researchers from the University of Strasbourg, working on improving BGP monitoring. Recently, we launched bgproutes.io, a new BGP data collection platform designed to increase both the quantity and quality of collected data, with the goal of improving the accuracy of BGP monitoring tools.
In this lightning talk, we will:
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Introduce bgproutes.io and highlight how it differs from RIPE RIS and RouteViews.
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Explain the benefits of using the BGP Monitoring Protocol (BMP) compared to traditional BGP sessions for data collection, and show how BMP can significantly improve visibility into inter-domain routing.
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Demonstrate how operators can connect to bgproutes.io via BMP, configure exactly what data they wish to share, and control what is excluded.
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Discuss key considerations when working with BMP data, including its particularities compared to data from a BGP session, and the implications when operators apply filters to the information they export to bgproutes.io.
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Describe how we store the data and how our API allows users to efficiently retrieve the specific information they need.
We look forward to engaging with the community to understand how operators perceive this new functionality, whether they find it useful, and how it can be improved. Using BMP to collect BGP data for inter-domain routing monitoring is still relatively new, and we are eager to learn how to apply it most effectively, thus any feedback will be very valuable.
Thomas is post doctoral researcher at the University of Strasbourg, France. His work aims to enhance BGP measurements, operations and monitoring. In 2023, he was a MANRS Ambassador.