The Sound of Silence: Is the Collector Peer Operational at This Time?

Numerous research contributions and monitoring systems in Interdomain Routing rely on data captured from specific vantage points on the Internet, referred to as Collector Peers, and collected by entities known as Route Collectors. In this paper, we first argue that current methods used to determine whether Collector Peers and Route Collectors are functioning correctly within a specific time frame are unreliable. To address this, we propose a method to assess the accuracy of the existing measurement framework. Our approach focuses on identifying sequences of update messages within Interdomain signaling, analyzing their start and end times, as well as their frequencies. We validate the accuracy of our method through two steps: (1) Analyzing sequences generated by a set of 'beacons' that emit Interdomain signaling at various frequencies, in order to evaluate our ability to characterize these sequence frequencies. (2) Assessing our ability to identify malfunctioning Collector Peers by comparing our results with known faults, which serve as the ground truth.