nxthdr, pronounced /ˈnɛkst ˈhɛdə˞/ or simply “Next Header”, is an initiative to offer metrology capabilities to researchers and students to study and learn about the Internet.

It integrates high-speed probing capabilities together with peering control, offering the community a unique platform. The nxthdr infrastructure enables Internet-scale route tracing while managing and collecting BGP advertisements from diverse vantage points and multiple IXPs, powered by the as215011 network.

Flagship Projects

Peering Platform

The peering platform is built around an autonomous system, as215011, which advertises multiple IPv6 prefixes. This network is designed to support researchers and students in conducting Internet-scale experiments on routing and peering. See the as215011 page for more information.

BGP data is collected using risotto BGP Monitoring Protocol (BMP) collector. Each as215011 router sends BMP messages to risotto, which stores the updates in a ClickHouse database. By maintaining a state, risotto ensures accurate and comprehensive BGP data, which is made freely available to everyone for analysis.

Probing Platform

The probing platform consists of multiple servers distributed worldwide. These servers can perform high-speed traceroute-like and ping-like measurements. They advertise as215011 IPv6 prefixes, allowing measurements using both source unicast and anycast addresses.

saimiris is a high-speed probing pipeline that provides the essential plumbing for users to perform active measurements from the probing servers. The measurements results are stored in a ClickHouse database and made freely available to everyone for analysis.

Values

Every aspect of nxthdr is open, transparent and participatory:

• The datasets collected is freely accessible under ODbL license, with no restrictions, delay, authentication, or need for justification.
• The tools powering the platform are all open-source, such as risotto and saimiris. You can use them, contribute to them, or even run your own instance.
• The infrastructure is managed entirely as open-source code. You can see the configuration of the servers and routers, the services running, the monitoring setup, the database tables and more. You can make suggestions or improvements by opening an issue or a pull request.
• The observability is public, with Grafana dashboards providing real-time insights into the platform’s health. It also ease the debugging and troubleshooting communication in case of issues.
• The roadmap of the project is public and participatory, inviting ideas and contributions. The roadmap is updated regularly to reflect the current state of the project. Feel free to open issues to suggest new features or improvements.
• The bookkeeping is complete and publicly available. It includes the financial transactions, the donations received and the budget forecast.

Get Involved

Join us on Discord to discuss the project and get involved!