Internet Routing Registries

With the creation of a new breed of ISPs that want to interconnect with one another, offering the required connectivity while maintaining flexibility and control has become more challenging. Each provider has a set of rules, or policies, that describe what to accept and what to advertise to all other neighboring networks. Sample policies include determining route filtering from a particular ISP and choosing a particular path to a specific destination. The potential for various policies from interconnected providers to conflict with and contradict one another is enormous.

Internet Routing Registries (IRRs) also serve as a public database for accessing routing contact information used for coordination and troubleshooting.

To address these challenges, a neutral routing registry (RR) for each global domain had to be created. Each RR maintains a database of routing policies created and updated by each service provider. The collection of these different databases is known as the Internet Routing Registry (IRR).

The role of the RR is not to determine policies, but rather to act as a repository for routing policy and administration information. This should provide a globally consistent view of all policies used by all providers all over the globe. A large number of network operators use routing information obtained from the routing registries to dynamically generate routing policies.

Autonomous systems (ASs) use Exterior Gateway Protocols (EGPs) such as BGP to work with one another. In complex environments, there should be a formal way of describing and communicating policies between different ASs. Maintaining a huge database containing all registered policies for the whole world would be cumbersome and difficult. This is why a more distributed approach was created. Each RR maintains its own database and must coordinate extensively to achieve consistency between the different databases. Here are some of the different IRR databases in existence today:

  • RIPE Routing Registry (European Internet service providers)

  • Cable & Wireless Routing Registry (C&W customers)

  • CA*net Routing Registry (CA*net customers)

  • JPRR Routing Registry (Japanese Internet service providers)

  • Routing Arbiter Database (public)

  • ARIN Routing Registry (public)

Each of the preceding registries serves a specific service provider's customer base, with the exception of the Routing Arbiter Database (RADB) and ARIN, which provide registration services to anyone. As mentioned earlier, the RADB is part of the Routing Arbiter project.

Because of the flexibility and benefits of maintaining a local registry, other companies such as Qwest, Level(3), and Verio have developed RRs as well.

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