Longitudinal Study Of Bgp Monitor Session Failures

BGP routing data collected by RouteViews and RIPE RIS have become an essential asset to both the network research and operation communities. However, it has long been speculated that the BGP monitoring sessions between operational routers and the data collectors fail from time to time. Such session failures lead to missing update messages as well as duplicate updates during session re-establishment, making analysis results derived from such data inaccurate. Since there is no complete record of these monitoring session failures, data users either have to sanitize the data discretionarily with respect to their specific needs or, more commonly, assume that session failures are infrequent enough and simply ignore them. In this paper, we present the first systematic assessment and documentary on BGP session failures of RouteViews and RIPE data collectors over the past eight years. Our results show that monitoring session failures are rather frequent, more than 30% of BGP monitoring sessions experienced at least one failure every month. Furthermore, we observed failures that happen to multiple peer sessions on the same collector around the same time, suggesting that the collector's local problems are a major factor in the session instability. We also developed a web site as a community resource to publish all session failures detected for RouteViews and RIPE RIS data collectors to help users select and clean up BGP data before performing their analysis.