Hi, Timur Snoke here with a description of maps I’ve developed that use Border Gateway Protocol routing tables to show the evolution of public-facing autonomous system numbers.
Organizations that route public internet protocol (IP) addresses receive autonomous system numbers (ASNs), which uniquely identify networks on the Internet. To coordinate traffic between ASNs, the Border Gateway Protocol (BGP) advertises available routing paths that network traffic could take to access other IP addresses. BGP tables select and advertise the best routes for network traffic. Consequently, BGP data often provide better insight into traffic ownership than the physical or the logical layer. This blog post describes maps that I have developed that use BGP routing tables to represent the evolution of public-facing ASNs.
Events of global interest can affect the Internet, and BGP can be used to track those effects. For example, if the citizens of a specific nation experienced problems accessing the Internet prior to an election, BGP routing tables for that country—including administrative ownership, organizational peering relationships, and data paths through physical connections—will demonstrate how Internet access could have been restricted.
