RIPE Atlas

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.

Technical details

 * Measurement types: The measurement devices (probes and anchors) perform IPv4 and IPv6 traceroute, ping, DNS, NTP and other measurements.
 * Atlas Probe device types:
 * Versions 1 and 2 of the probe: Lantronix XPort Pro
 * Version 3 probe: modified TP-Link wireless router (model TL-MR 3020)
 * Version 4 probe: NanoPi NEO Plus2 single-board computer
 * Version 5 probe: custom design, derived from Turris Mox, developed by CZ.NIC
 * 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
 * The back-end architecture was described in detail in the September 2015 edition of the Internet Protocol Journal

Community
Anyone can volunteer to host a RIPE Atlas probe. 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.

Tools for visualizing and analyzing RIPE Atlas measurement data are used by network operators for troubleshooting and network monitoring.

Open source software tools, written by RIPE Atlas users, are available in the repository for community contributions on GitHub.

Several hundred individuals also support RIPE Atlas as "ambassadors" by promoting participation and distributing probes. Organizations also support RIPE Atlas as sponsors.

Multiple hackerspaces have installed RIPE Atlas probes and have their own project about displaying the probes presence.

Research papers
All the data collected by RIPE Atlas is open data and is made publicly available to users and the wider Internet community.


 * Impact of the first months of war on routing and latency in Ukraine


 * A worldwide study on the geographic locality of Internet routes


 * Measuring Internet Resilience in Africa


 * Surrounded by the Clouds: A Comprehensive Cloud Reachability Study
 * Pruning Edge Research with Latency Shears
 * Measuring DNS over TLS from the Edge: Adoption, Reliability, and Response Times
 * Processing large-scale Internet topology data to model Autonomous System Networks
 * Poster: Footprint and Performance of Large Cloud Networks
 * Quantifying the Impact of Blocklisting in the Age of Address Reuse
 * Impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on the Internet latency: a large-scale study
 * (How Much) Does a Private WAN Improve Cloud Performance?
 * Debogonising 2a10::/12. Analysis of one week’s visibility of a new /12
 * Tracking Down Sources of Spoofed IP Packets
 * On the Performance of DNS Resolvers in the IPv6 and ECS Era
 * Roll, Roll, Roll your Root: A Comprehensive Analysis of the First Ever DNSSEC Root KSK Rollover
 * Performance Barriers to Cloud Services in Africa’s Public Sector: A Latency Perspective
 * DNS Observatory: The Big Picture of the DNS
 * Cache Me If You Can: Effects of DNS Time-to-Live
 * Judicious QoS using Cloud Overlays
 * Internet Development in Africa: A Content Use, Hosting and Distribution Perspective
 * Periodic Path Changes in RIPE Atlas
 * Using RIPE Atlas for Geolocating IP Infrastructure
 * Dissecting the Speed-of-Internet of Middle East
 * Cross-AS (X-AS) Internet topology mapping
 * Karaoke: Distributed Private Messaging Immune to Passive Traffic Analysis
 * Radian: Visual Exploration of Traceroutes
 * How to Catch when Proxies Lie: Verifying the Physical Locations of Network Proxies with Active Geolocation
 * A Long Way to the Top: Significance, Structure, and Stability of Internet Top Lists
 * An Empirical Analysis of the Commercial VPN Ecosystem
 * Ensuring a Future for Detecting Internet Disruptions: A Field Survey of the Ecosystem Around Internet Censorship, Disruptions, and Shutdowns
 * Characterizing User-to-User Connectivity with RIPE Atlas
 * Measurement Vantage Point Selection Using A Similarity Metric
 * Disco: Fast, Good, and Cheap Outage Detection
 * Geolocation hints verification using RIPE Atlas
 * Using RIPE Atlas to Evaluate the Locator/Id Separation Protocol
 * Performance Evaluation of Locator/Identifier Separation Protocol through RIPE Atlas
 * Sibyl: A Practical Internet Route Oracle
 * On the Analysis of Internet Paths with DisNETPerf, a Distributed Paths Performance Analyzer
 * Detecting DNS Root Manipulation
 * Measuring, Characterizing, and Avoiding Spam Traffic Costs
 * Internet Performance Measurement Platforms
 * Visualization and Monitoring for the Identification and Analysis of DNS Issues
 * Investigating Interdomain Routing Policies
 * Mapping Peering Interconnections
 * Lessons Learned From Using the RIPE Atlas Platform for Measurement Research
 * Quantifying Interference between Measurements on the RIPE Atlas Platform
 * Are We One Hop Away from a Better Internet?
 * Analyzing the Performance of an Anycast CDN
 * Investigating Interdomain Routing Policies in the Wild
 * Dissecting Last-mile Latency Characteristics
 * Vantage Point Selection for IPv6 Measurements: Benefits and Limitations of RIPE Atlas Tags
 * Network Interference Detection
 * Generating Function For Network Delay