Global ISP interconnectivity by AS number -- background

The form processes data collected daily (at night) from a route server with BGP connections to multiple geographically distributed target operational routers. It allows for constructing interconnection maps by Autonomous System (AS) numbers. As of mid-November 1997 a daily file contains almost 40 megabytes of information, and is immediately processed into:

a one line summary of counts of net/mask prefixes, AS numbers and AS interconnections (ASconnsummary),
pairs of interconnected Autonomous Systems (ASconnpairs),
lists of what other Autonomous Systems a specific Autonomous System is connected to (ASconnlist), and
a list of network number and mask pairs that have multiple originating Autonomous System numbers across the observed BGP peers (ASnnorg).

Those results are based on the data from the route server, which includes information such as:

      Network          Next Hop          Metric LocPrf Weight Path
   *> 4.0.0.0          134.24.127.3                         0 1740 1 i
   *                   194.68.130.254                       0 5459 5413 1 i
   *                   158.43.133.48                        0 1849 702 701 1 i
   *                   193.0.0.242                          0 3333 286 1 i
   *                   144.228.240.93                       0 1239 1 i

Then AS interconnectivity information is generated from the "Path" data. In the above example, it is assumed that:

AS 1 connects to AS 1749, AS 5413, AS 701, and AS 1239
AS 5413 connects to AS 5459,
AS 702 connects to AS 701 and AS 1849
AS 286 connects to AS 3333

The data is collected on moat.nlanr.net from a route service in Oregon (contact David M. Meyer at the University of Oregon for details). As of 8 November 1997, the Oregon route server has BGP connections with:

CERFnet (San Diego)
Europe (RIPE)
IAGnet (Chicago)
IIJ (Japan)
LINX (London)
MCI (San Francisco)
PIPEX (London)
Sprint (Stockton)
Verio (MAE-WEST)
blackrose.org (Ann Arbor)

A CRON job on moat.nlanr.net collects the full routing tables every night since 9 November 1997 with a getBGPmap shell script. getBGPmap starts the getb.pl Perl program to actually transfer the current routing tables from the route server to a data directory on moat.nlanr.net, and processes it into the summary files. I.e., getb.pl:

writes into moat.nlanr.net's /R2/AS/Data:
--> map file: ASmap.{date}.{seconds}
example date: 971110
example seconds in Unix format: 879158401
(transfer takes about 15 minutes in mid-11/97)
starts bco.pl to summarize the tables
--> writes into /R2/AS/Data:
- ASconnsummary.{date}.{seconds}
- ASconnlist.{date}.{seconds}
- ASconnpairs.{date}.{seconds}
--> starts nnorg.pl to determine inconsistent originating Autonomous System numbers of address/mask pairs per BGP peer
--> gzip-compress the large ASmap file

An example resulting directory structure (without ASmap compression):

   %moat[114]/R2/AS/Data 10:57 0: l
   total 125615
   drwxrwsr-x  2 hwb hwb     1024 Nov 10 10:50 ./
   drwxrwsr-x  3 hwb hwb     1024 Nov 10 10:21 ../
   -rw-rw-r--  1 hwb hwb    81515 Nov 10 10:36 ASconnlist.971108.879009857
   -rw-rw-r--  1 hwb hwb    81514 Nov 10 10:37 ASconnlist.971109.879072001
   -rw-rw-r--  1 hwb hwb    82058 Nov 10 10:40 ASconnlist.971110.879158401
   -rw-rw-r--  1 hwb hwb    81410 Nov 10 10:36 ASconnpairs.971108.879009857
   -rw-rw-r--  1 hwb hwb    81376 Nov 10 10:37 ASconnpairs.971109.879072001
   -rw-rw-r--  1 hwb hwb    82035 Nov 10 10:40 ASconnpairs.971110.879158401
   -rw-rw-r--  1 hwb hwb       67 Nov 10 10:36 ASconnsummary.971108.879009857
   -rw-rw-r--  1 hwb hwb       67 Nov 10 10:37 ASconnsummary.971109.879072001
   -rw-rw-r--  1 hwb hwb       67 Nov 10 10:40 ASconnsummary.971110.879158401
   -rw-r--r--  1 hwb hwb 38019044 Nov  8 13:15 ASmap.971108.879009857
   -rw-r--r--  1 hwb hwb 37849249 Nov  9 02:54 ASmap.971109.879072001
   -rw-r--r--  1 hwb hwb 37927330 Nov 10 02:55 ASmap.971110.879158401
   %moat[115]/R2/AS/Data 10:57 0:

To process the Autonomous System data into web-displayable format, the form itself collects parameters to start ASproc.pl, which displays ASCII output directly, but starts ASprocVRML.pl to generate the VRML objects. The VRML objects are never stored, but generated and written directly to the client.

At this point of time the VRML objects are best viewed with geomview on a fast machine (such as a 200MHz PPro running Linux), as it generates thousants of coordinate points for all the AS numbers it finds. Also, the lighting is better suited for geomview.

16 November 1997, HWB