Route Collectors: Collecting all of most of the available routes!

The Internet, often perceived as a single entity, is in fact a collection of smaller networks, each speaking the Border Gateway Protocol (BGP). Despite this common protocol, individual experiences of what the Internet is can vary significantly depending on the point of observation. These differences present challenges for analysis, which is typically conducted using data provided by Route Collectors (RCs). RCs act as the 'memory' of the Internet, capturing snapshots of the Global Routing Table (GRT) through Routing Information Base (RIB) dumps and incremental updates.

This presentation will discuss the major RC projects, such as RIPE RIS, RouteViews, and PCH, that have extensive collections of routing information, providing researchers with diverse perspectives from different vantage points. However, some downsides of these RC projects will be discussed, including potentially unexpected or unwanted information, such as private address space or more-specific prefixes. Other included aspects refer to developments surrounding RCs, such as RIS Live, per-peer dumps, and CAIDA BGP Stream, and recent proposals advocating for semi-mandatory RC peering (MANRS VIP zones). The presentation offers suggestions for easy to implement practical improvements in RC infrastructure to support more accurate and efficient Internet measurement.