Expanding Routing Visibility at IXPs with BMP#

Thomas Holterbach, bgproutes.io

• Why: Route-server looking glasses only show what survived policy; BMP exposes the whole routing pipeline at an IXP — pre-policy, filtered, and non-best routes plus peer/session state — which changes what both IXP operators and participants can detect (hijacks, leaks, misbehaving peers).
• What: A proposal and practical demonstration (the bgproutes.io IXP Explorer) for BMP-based monitoring at IXPs, plus an honest treatment of the open problems: processing and storing large BMP volumes at big IXPs, efficient data serving, and consistent access across collection platforms and storage architectures, ending with a roadmap for community adoption.
• How: Both BIRD and FRRouting can export BMP when deployed as route servers; BMP is positioned as complementary to existing approaches (direct route-server queries à la Alice-LG, and dedicated add-path collection sessions). The talk frames IXP monitoring as serving two audiences: IXP operators securing the fabric, and participants making peering and troubleshooting decisions.
• Where applicable: Any IXP operator; of the 1,226 IXPs listed on PeeringDB most are small/medium and can adopt this sooner — the scaling challenges are specific to the largest exchanges.