RIPE Atlas is a global, open, distributed Internet measurement platform, consisting of thousands of measurement devices that measure Internet connectivity in real time.
History
RIPE Atlas was established in 2010 by the RIPE Network Coordination Centre. As of April 2022, it was composed of around 12,000 probes and more than 800 anchors around the world.[1]
Technical details
Measurement types: The measurement devices (probes and anchors) perform IPv4 and IPv6traceroute, ping, DNS, NTP and other measurements.
Atlas Probe device types:
Versions 1 and 2 of the probe: Lantronix XPort Pro [2]
Version 5 probe: custom design, derived from Turris Mox, developed by CZ.NIC[5]
Atlas Anchor device types
Version 2: Soekris Net6501-70 board in the 1U 19-inch rack-mounted case with additional SSD
Version 3: PC Engines APU2C2/APU2C4 in a 1U 19-inch rack-mounted case with additional SSD
Probes and Anchors can also be hosted in a virtual machine, which is beneficial for organizations with existing server infrastructure[6][7]
The back-end architecture was described in detail in the September 2015 edition of the Internet Protocol Journal [8]
Community
Anyone can volunteer to host a RIPE Atlas probe.[9] Probes are free of charge, low maintenance, and can be plugged in behind a home router or in a data center.
Organisations that want additional RIPE Atlas measurements targeting their network can host a RIPE Atlas anchor.[10]
Tools for visualizing and analyzing RIPE Atlas measurement data are used by network operators for troubleshooting and network monitoring.[11]
Open source software tools, written by RIPE Atlas users, are available in the repository for community contributions on GitHub.[12]
Several hundred individuals also support RIPE Atlas as "ambassadors" by promoting participation and distributing probes. Organizations also support RIPE Atlas as sponsors.[13]
Multiple hackerspaces have installed RIPE Atlas probes and have their own project about displaying the probes presence.[14]
Research papers
All the data collected by RIPE Atlas is open data and is made publicly available to users and the wider Internet community.
Phokeer, Amreesh; Chege, Kevin; Chavula, Josiah; Elmokashfi, Ahmed; Gueye, Assane (April 2021). "Measuring Internet Resilience in Africa"(PDF). Internet Society (ISOC). Archived(PDF) from the original on 2021-05-18. Retrieved 2021-05-25.
Corneo, Lorenzo; Eder, Maximilian; Mohan, Nitinder; Zavodovski, Aleksandr; Bayhan, Suzan; Wong, Walter; Gunningberg, Per; Kangasharju, Jussi; Ott, Jörg (November 2020). "Surrounded by the Clouds"(PDF). The Web Conference (WWW) 2021. Archived(PDF) from the original on 2021-04-20. Retrieved 2021-04-20.
Mohan, Nitinder; Corneo, Lorenzo; Zavodovski, Aleksandr; Bayhan, Suzan; Wong, Walter; Kangasharju, Jussi (November 2020). "Pruning Edge Research with Latency Shears"(PDF). ACM Workshop on Hot Topics in Networks (HotNets) 2020. Archived(PDF) from the original on 2020-11-01. Retrieved 2021-04-20.
Fonseca, Osvaldo; Cunha, Ítalo; Fazzion, Elverton; Meira, Wagner; Junior, Brivaldo; Ferreira, Ronaldo; Katz-Bassett, Ethan (22–26 June 2020). "Tracking Down Sources of Spoofed IP Packets". IFIP Networking: 208–216. Archived from the original on 29 September 2020. Retrieved 21 November 2020.
Chavula, Josiah; Phokeer, Amreesh; Calandro, Enrico (22 March 2019). "Performance Barriers to Cloud Services in Africa's Public Sector: A Latency Perspective". E-Infrastructure and e-Services for Developing Countries. Lecture Notes of the Institute for Computer Sciences, Social Informatics and Telecommunications Engineering. Vol. 275. pp. 152–163. doi:10.1007/978-3-030-16042-5_15. ISBN978-3-030-16041-8. S2CID169836720.
Moura, Giovane; Heidemann, John; De Schmidt, Ricardo; Hardaker, Wes (October 2019). "Cache Me if You Can: Effects of DNS Time-to-Live". Proceedings of the Internet Measurement Conference. pp. 101–115. doi:10.1145/3355369.3355568. ISBN978-1-4503-6948-0. S2CID197622020.
Calandro, Enrico; Chavula, Josiah; Phokeer, Amreesh (22 March 2019). "Internet Development in Africa: A Content Use, Hosting and Distribution Perspective". E-Infrastructure and e-Services for Developing Countries. Lecture Notes of the Institute for Computer Sciences, Social Informatics and Telecommunications Engineering. Vol. 275. pp. 131–141. doi:10.1007/978-3-030-16042-5_13. ISBN978-3-030-16041-8. S2CID169471605.
Holterbach, T.; Aben, E.; Pelsser, C.; Bush, R.; Vanbeve, L. (July 2017). "Measurement Vantage Point Selection Using A Similarity Metric"(PDF). Proceedings of 2016 Applied Networking Research Workshop, Prague, Czech Republic. Archived(PDF) from the original on 2021-08-27. Retrieved 2017-07-12.
Cunha, I.; Marchetta, P.; Calder, M.; Chiu, Y.; Schlinker, B.; Machado, B.; Pescape, A.; Giotsas, V.; Madhyastha, H.; Katz-Bassett., E. (2016). "Sibyl: A Practical Internet Route Oracle"(PDF). USENIX Symposium on Networked Systems Design & Implementation (NSDI). Archived(PDF) from the original on 2017-06-27. Retrieved 2017-07-11.
Bajpai, V.; Schonwalder, J. (2015). "A Survey on Internet Performance Measurement Platforms and Related Standardization Efforts". Communications Surveys & Tutorials. 17 (3): 1313–1341. doi:10.1109/COMST.2015.2418435. S2CID7846757.
Bajpai, Vaibhav; Eravuchira, Steffie Jacob; Schönwälder, Jürgen (2015-07-01). "Lessons Learned From Using the RIPE Atlas Platform for Measurement Research". ACM SIGCOMM Computer Communication Review. 45 (3): 35–42. doi:10.1145/2805789.2805796. ISSN0146-4833. S2CID15680865.
Sukhov, A. M.; Kuznetsova, N. Yu.; Pervitsky, A. K.; Galtsev, A. A. (2010). "Generating Function For Network Delay". Journal of High Speed Networks. 22 (4): 321. arXiv:1003.0190. doi:10.3233/JHS-160552. S2CID10873658.