RouteViews is a project at the University of Oregon, founded in 1995, that collects and archives BGP routing data from the global Internet by peering with networks at Internet Exchange Points worldwide. RouteViews data is not packet traffic. It is a publicly archived record of BGP routing state, collected by passive observation: collectors peer with real networks and record what those peers send, without injecting or forwarding any traffic. The data shows which networks announce which address blocks, which AS paths are visible from different vantage points, and how those paths change during outages, leaks, hijacks, maintenance, and normal churn.
Border Gateway Protocol: the inter-domain protocol by which independently run networks tell each other, “I can reach this IP prefix through this AS path.”
AS / ASN
An Autonomous System is one administrative network. Its ASN is the number in AS paths, such as 64510 in this mock page.
Prefix
A block of IP addresses, such as 203.0.113.0/24, announced into BGP by an origin AS.
RIB
Routing Information Base: a periodic snapshot of a collector's full BGP table as received from its peers at a given moment. RouteViews archives RIB dumps approximately every two hours, interleaved with a continuous stream of UPDATE messages that record changes between snapshots.
UPDATE
A message announcing a new route or withdrawing an old route. Route changes are reconstructed by applying UPDATEs between RIB snapshots.
Collector / vantage point
A router, typically deployed at an Internet Exchange Point, that establishes BGP peering sessions with real network operators and records what those peers send it, without forwarding or announcing any routes itself. RouteViews has over a thousand peers across dozens of collectors hosted at IXPs. Different collectors see different views because they occupy different positions in the global topology.
What RouteViews-style data lets people ask
“Is my prefix visible?”
Operators can check whether collectors around the world see their route, which origin AS is attached to it, and whether paths are unexpectedly long or absent.
“Did someone hijack or leak it?”
If a prefix suddenly appears with a new origin AS, or via an implausible transit path, the UPDATE stream can reveal when and where the suspicious route propagated.
“How did the Internet recover?”
By comparing collectors, RIB snapshots, and UPDATE sequences, researchers can estimate propagation, convergence, outage blast radius, churn, and routing policy effects.
“Is my route origin authorized (RPKI)?”
RouteViews data is used to monitor deployment of Route Origin Authorizations (ROAs), which specify which AS is allowed to originate a given prefix. Comparing observed BGP origins against published ROAs is a key operational use today.
“Who are my peers, and are they visible?”
Operators use RouteViews to verify peer visibility: checking whether upstream providers or route servers are correctly propagating their routes.
RouteViews is operated by the Network Startup Resource Center (NSRC) at the University of Oregon and funded in part by the National Science Foundation. The real, live data is freely available at routeviews.org.