Abstract: New Services From the RIPE NCC

Henk Uijterwaal, RIPE Network Coordination Centre

During the last five years, the RIPE NCC has been working on two new services for the entire ISP community: TTM or Test Traffic Measurements, and the RIS or Routing Information Service. These projects were presented at the Winter 2000 NANOG meeting, but a large number of new features have been added during the last three years.

Test Traffic Measurements

The TTM now consists of a network of +/- 70 machines measuring delay and loss between sites all over the world. Since 1999, two new measurements have been added:

  • IP delay variations, a.k.a. jitter
  • Bandwidth measurements, providing an estimate of the total available bandwidth between sites as well as the unused bandwidth.
  • We also present the new CDMA-based version of the measurement device. CDMA is a 3rd generation mobile telephony standard that, as a side effect, produces a timing signal. This timing signal can be used to measure the performance of both IPv4 and IPv6 networks down to the 10-microsecond level, anywhere when one can use a mobile phone, without the need for an expensive and hard-to-install GPS system.

    Routing Information Service

    The RIS is now collecting BGP information from nine sites world-wide, with collectors in North America, Europe and Asia. Some 200 ISP's are participating by providing a BGP feed. New applications of the data since the project was presented at the winter 2000 NANOG include:

  • Daily lists of hot-spots with the most active prefixes
  • Analysis of flaps in the routing table.
  • Detection of AS's and prefixes announced by ISP's but not properly registered in the whois database and/or not assigned to them.
  • Multi-homing effects.
  • The talk gives a short overview of the various services and how they can be used in daily ISP operations, using the shutdown of a major European backbone provider that recently went bankrupt as an example.

    About the Presenter
    Henk Uijterwaal is the manager of the New Projects Group at the RIPE-NCC. Since joining the RIPE-NCC in 1997, he has divided his time between the Test Traffic Measurements, the Routing Information Service (described above) and the DISI project on DNSSEC deployment.

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