Delivering diverse BGP data in real-time and through multi-format archiving

The Internet relies on BGP for global routing, but there are many open questions related to BGP. Some researchers rely on BGP data to better understand routing behavior and develop new routing algorithms. Other researchers use BGP data to investigate issues that range from IP allocations to regional Internet connectivity in the face of political turmoil. And of course BGP data is used in routing security issue, both to detect issues, evaluate solutions, and even issue warnings or block invalid routes. All of these research challenges require access to a reliable set of BGP data from geographically diverse locations. This papers presents the BGPmon approach to collecting and distributing BGP data at global scale. BGPmon collects data from diverse set of peers and distributes the data in real-time to any interested client. BGPmon fulfills three main design objectives: it provides a scalable data collection solution, maintains data integrity despite traffic surges and slow client processing, and it provides a suite of associated tools in order to ease the overhead of developing BGP data processing tools. We demonstrate the effectiveness of the framework with a brief characterization of the data collected from direct peers.