Isolario: a Do-ut-des Approach to Improve the Appeal of BGP Route Collecting

Abstract: The incompleteness of data collected from BGP route collecting projects is a well-known issue which potentially affects every research activity carried out on the analysis of the Internet inter-domain routing. Recent works explained that one of the possible solutions is to increase the number of ASes feeding these projects from the Internet periphery, in order to reveal the hidden portion of peering connectivity of their upstream providers. The main problem is that these projects are currently not appealing enough for the network administrators of these ASes, which are typically not aware of their existence or not interested enough to share their data. Our contribution is Isolario, a project based on the do-ut-des principle which aims at persuading network administrators to share their routing information by offering services in return, ranging from real-time analyses of the incoming BGP session(s) to historic analyses of routing reachability. To the best of our knowledge, Isolario is the only route collecting project publicly available which offers a set of services to its users to encourage their participation, aiming at increasing the amount of BGP data publicly available for research purposes.