RIS Routing Beacons

A Routing Beacon or BGP Beacon is a Border Gateway Protocol (BGP) speaker that announces and withdraws a particular Classless Inter Domain Routing (CIDR) prefix at predetermined time intervals.

• There should be only a small amount of traffic to this destination.
• Its main purpose is to help us understand BGP route propagation and convergence.
• Researchers can study properties of these phenomena by observing BGP updates for the Routing Beacon's prefix from various views throughout the Internet.

The RIPE NCC RIS Project added Routing Beacon functionality to its Remote Route Collectors (RRC). The geographically dispersed distribution of these RRCs makes them ideal for this purpose.

The RIPE NCC maintains a list of current RIS routing beacons.

Presentations

• First Analysis of the Beacon Data | Henk Uijterwaal
• Route Flap Damping: Harmful? | Randy Bush, Tim Griffin and Zhuoqing Morley Mao
• What is the Sound of One Route Flapping | Tim Griffin
• Delayed Internet Routing Convergence | C. Labovitz, A. Ahuja, A. Bose and F. Jahanian
• Route Flap Damping Exacerbates Internet Routing Convergence | Zhuoqing Morley Mao, Ramesh Govindan, George Varghese and Randy Katz

Papers and Documents

• ripe-378: RIPE Routing Working Group Recommendations on Route-flap Damping | Christian Panigl and Philip Smith
• RFC2439: "BGP Route Flap Damping | C. Villamizar, R. Chandra and R. Govindan

Further Reading

• Cisco BGP Pages
• Joe's BGP Page
• Tim Griffin's Interdomain Routing Links

How to Lease a Beacon

If you need different announcement or withdrawal patterns for a defined period of time, contact us at ris@ripe.net.