[routing-wg]On BGP Communities

Dear RIPE Routing Working Group,

During the past years, we have seen an increasing usage of the BGP  
community attribute.  For instance, in a recent BGP table dump from  
routeviews, 99% of the routes stored by the router carries BGP  
communities.

In this context, we are currently working on a BGP community  
taxonomy, i.e., we want to classify and document communities  
according to their usage.  We describe our taxonomy on the following  
url: http://inl.info.ucl.ac.be/communities

Based on this taxonomy, we tried to collect as much as possible  
information on BGP communities.  This was a daunting task as we  
mainly relied on public database, such as whois server and ISP web  
sites.

Our current database of classified BGP communities currently contains  
more than 27,000 entries.

As researchers, we are now in the process of writing a paper on our  
work on BGP communities.

We plan to submit this paper to ACM SIGCOMM Computer Communication  
Review for the April issue.  This is an editorial paper (max. 4 pages).

You can find a preprint of the paper at the following URL: http:// 
inl.info.ucl.ac.be/communities or directly at  http:// 
inl.info.ucl.ac.be/system/files/communities.pdf

Any comments on the paper is welcome.

Thank you very much.

Keep on Rockin'

Dr. Benoit Donnet & Prof. Olivier Bonaventure

--
Dr. Benoit Donnet
Université Catholique de Louvain (UCL)
Faculté des Sciences Appliquées - Département d'Ingénierie  
Informatique (INGI)
Place Sainte Barbe, 2
1348 Louvain-la-Neuve
Belgium
Phone: +32 10 47 87 18
Home page: http://inl.info.ucl.ac.be/donnet