RouteViews RIB
RouteViews provides full snapshots of the global BGP routing table collected from multiple vantage points worldwide. Operated by the University of Oregon, it is one of the longest-running and most important BGP measurement projects on the internet. We use RouteViews RIB dumps as the foundation for our IP-to-prefix and prefix-to-ASN mapping on robtex.com and rtsak.com.
Source:RouteViews RIB
What is RouteViews?
The RouteViews project was founded in 1997 by David Meyer at the University of Oregon to provide real-time views of the internet routing system. It operates BGP collectors at major internet exchange points around the world, where participating networks establish BGP peering sessions and share their full routing tables.
Each RouteViews collector receives BGP updates from dozens of peers, building a multi-perspective view of the global routing table. The project publishes two types of data:
- RIB dumps (Routing Information Base) - Complete snapshots of the routing table taken at regular intervals. Each dump contains every prefix and the full AS path used to reach it from that collector's perspective
- BGP updates - Real-time stream of route announcements and withdrawals, capturing every change to the routing table as it happens
The RIB dumps are stored in MRT (Multi-Threaded Routing Toolkit) format, a compact binary encoding standardized in RFC 6396. A single RIB dump from one collector can contain 900,000+ IPv4 prefixes and 200,000+ IPv6 prefixes, representing the full reachable internet.
RouteViews data is used by network operators, security researchers, and internet measurement projects worldwide. It enables detection of BGP hijacks, tracking of routing changes, measurement of AS path lengths, and building of IP-to-ASN mapping databases. The project's long archive, stretching back decades, makes it invaluable for historical routing analysis.
How We Use This Data
RouteViews RIB data is the primary source for two critical mappings on our sites:
- IP-to-prefix mapping (
ip2netv4,ip2netv6) - Given any IP address, determine which BGP prefix covers it. This tells you the network block the IP belongs to - Prefix-to-ASN mapping (
net2asv4,net2asv6) - Given a prefix, determine which AS originates it. This identifies the network operator responsible for that address space
On rtsak.com, these mappings power AS and prefix lookup pages. When you look up an IP address on robtex.com, we use this data to identify the announcing AS and display the full routing context including AS path information.
We parse the MRT-format RIB dumps using our import-bgpdump.ts importer, which extracts prefix-origin pairs and builds optimized lookup tables in MongoDB. The import processes both IPv4 and IPv6 routing tables, handling multi-origin prefixes and filtering out bogon routes.