LITERATURE STUDY ON BGP DATA ANALYSES

BGP RIB table growth from http://bgp.potaroo.net/

In recent years, there have been increasing interest in the BGP protocol operation and research, one of the most significant current discussions lie on security with less focus on the analysis of BGP data and what useful operations or inference  can be done with this data in a network. BGP research today has been solely based on the internet. While, my study is focused on community networks, analysis that has been done before may prove contradictory or different from BGP internet analyses. In the internet today, most ASes are considered to be ISP's or very large scale networks while in community networks, each node running at it's municipality or area is considered an Autonomous System.

BGP table growth from Cisco. 

A considerable amount of literature has been published on the study of bgp data analyses. However, majority of these studies were done during the rising age of BGP and not very recently. There is no doubt that some other studies have been done, but not really into the focus of BGP data analyses.

The first serious discussions and analyses of BGP emerged in 1991 by Y. Rekhter (rfc1265)   for BGP while after the new BGPv4 version, a new analysis study was done by Meyer & Patel in 2006 (rfc4274). These studies were focused on BGP's general analysis on bandwidth, performance, scalability and memory requirements. Since BGP dumps collected from routers is not in a readable format this data is considered RAW and needs to be processed by some tool, using some format in other to make it human readable which is how the MRT routing information export format came about. According to the  rfc draft by L blunk et al,  "the MRT format was developed to encapsulate, export, and archive this information in a standardized data representation". So today we have different tools available with this format implemented for conversion. An obsolete library called  Libbgpdump  written by Dan Ardelean is one of these. Today, we have the BGPdump and other tools that uses this library. The analyses of BGP data can be classified as a parent among other studies like : ASPATH analyses, BGP routing table analyses and others which strongly relate to the actual constituents of BGPdata. The first study that actually does the analysis of BGP data was done by :