A Proposal of improving reliability of IRR database

Proposed by: Masasi Eto , Nara Institute of Science and Technology
Date: 25 July 2003

1.Background
Operators generally view IRR as an obscure system and it is known that there is 
less reliability in IRR database. This understanding prevents the widespread use
of IRR.

2.Proposal
(1)Our proposal is to implement a light weight prefix
checker which can identify invalid origin-as prefix,
compared with prefixes in BGP router and IRR database.

(2)On the other hand, we also propose a system to investigate the consistency 
among AS policies in the whole IRR databases in the world.

3.Purpose
We aim to improve reliability of data in IRR databases
to promote widespread use of IRR.
To achieve this purpose, we propose two approaches.

(1)Operators can grasp which prefix is invalid origin-as easily. sBGP/soBGP are 

final goal however these are too heavy to check which prefix is invalid or not.

(2)And we aim to establish a mechanism to conduct an examination on the global 
scale with appropriate efficiency.

4.Implementation
(1)To implement our proposal, there needs two modifications. One is to implement 
"download" mechanism in BGP router which queries IRR database once a day and 
receive prefix/origin-as pair generated from route object. The other is to 
implement "response" mechanism in IRR database, which receives "download" 
message from BGP router and send "response" message which contains all 
prefix/origin-as pairs in IRR database.

(2)To examine how many inconsistencies are on IRR databases, and to prevent 
increasing these inconsistencies, we implemented "Policy Check Server".