Welcome to the official home page of the Sorbonne IP Route Survey (IPRS)
Sorbonne IPRS is an initiative to continuously monitor IP-level routing across the internet.
This is done through the regular collection of traceroute-style measurements from multiple vantage points towards a significant portion of the internet's routable address blocks.
The survey is conducted by the Dioptra research group at Sorbonne University's LIP6 computer science laboratory.
As of December 2024, IPRS provides:
- Four daily IPv4 snapshots featuring multipath route traces from ten vantage points, covering all routable IPv4 /24 prefixes
- One daily IPv6 snapshot with single-path route traces covering a substantial number of prefixes
IPRS data is available through two primary channels:
IPv4 snapshots are accessible via Measurement Lab's Google BigQuery tables.
This data is provided in the scamper1 format, consistent with existing Measurement Lab traceroute data.
Contact the Dioptra group directly for your additional data needs:
- More detailed versions of the IPv4 data
- The IPv6 data
We can make this data available to you as ClickHouse tables, which are an Amazon S3-compatible format. Other formats are also possible.
Please cite this data as M-Lab's Sorbonne IPRS Data Set, , or, if directly obtained from Dioptra, as The Sorbonne IPRS Data Set, .
Our development roadmap focuses on two key areas.
We are working to:
- Increase snapshot frequency from hour-level to minute-level time resolution
- Expand coverage of internet routes that are not well covered by current publicly-available data
- Improve observers' ability to detect and track network attacks and anomalies
Our mission is to serve a diverse set of stakeholders, including content providers, network operators, telecom regulators, cybersecurity analysts, and internet measurement researchers.
We welcome your feedback to better align IPRS capabilities with community needs.
IPRS relies on free, liberally-licensed open-source software:
- The measurements are orchestrated by the Iris measurement orchestration system.
- The dynamic allocation of IPv4 destination prefixes to vantage points is determined by the Zeph reinforcement learning algorithm. IPv6 destination prefix allocations are currently static.
- At each vantage point, probe packets are sent and probe replies are received and logged by the Caracal high-speed probing tool that we currently throttle to 100,000 packets per second.
- The determination of which probe packets should be sent, and in which order, is conducted using the Diamond-Miner algorithm for IPv4 and the yarrp algorithm for IPv6.
Iris, Zeph, Diamond-Miner, and Caracal have been developed by the Dioptra research group. We offer implementation support for individuals and organizations interested in utilizing this technology stack.
The Sorbonne IP Route Survey is related to several other initiatives, most of which predate IPRS by many years. These include IP-level data sets and BGP-level data sets.
IPRS is most similar to the following IP-level route tracing initiative:
- CAIDA's Archipelago, or Ark, data. Ark also collects IP-level routes at internet scale. IPRS collects snapshots at a higher frequency than does Ark, and IPRS sees more IP addresses and
traceroute-style links between those addresses. However, Ark collects snapshots from a larger number of vantage points, and different vantage points than does IPRS, thereby collecting route segments that IPRS does not currently obtain.
IPRS is also related to other IP-level route tracing initiatives:
- Measurement Lab's Traceroute data. This is also not an internet-scale routing survey. However, it, too, contains an immense number of route traces.
- The RIPE Atlas data. While RIPE Atlas is not an internet-scale routing survey, the dataset does contain an immense number of route traces from on the order of 10,000 vantage points. RIPE Atlas only conducts single-path route traces, whereas the IPRS and Measurement Lab Traceroute data sets provide multipath route traces.
- Measurement Lab's Reverse Traceeroute data. Similar to IPRS, and in contrast to the other initiatives listed here, this is relatively recent.
Routes can also be seen at the BGP level. The advantage of BGP feeds for following routing changes in near-real-time is their short timescale. There are two main initiatives:
- The Oregon RouteViews Project
- The RIPE Routing Information Service (RIS)
Sorbonne IPRS is funded in part by a cybersecurity grant from the French Ministry of Armed Forces. Sorbonne University is a sponsor of Measurement Lab. The Dioptra research group receives cloud credits from Google in support of this partnership, and Measurement Lab hosts IPRS data.