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ACM Netw."],"published-print":{"date-parts":[[2025,11,24]]},"abstract":"<jats:p>BGP communities are widely used by operators to encode routing metadata for traffic engineering, policy enforcement, and operational debugging. However, \u224890% of observed communities lack public documentation, limiting their utility for research and operational analysis. Among these, city-level communities offer valuable geographic insight into routing behavior, yet remain largely untapped. In this paper, we develop a scalable method to infer the geographic meaning of undocumented city communities using BGP data. We validate our approach against a ground truth dataset covering 1,482 city communities and through operator feedback. Applied to data from May 2025, our algorithm infers the locations of 80% of city communities with a precision of 70 km or better. We publish all code and datasets to support reproducibility and further research.<\/jats:p>","DOI":"10.1145\/3768998","type":"journal-article","created":{"date-parts":[[2025,11,25]],"date-time":"2025-11-25T17:09:56Z","timestamp":1764090596000},"page":"1-13","update-policy":"https:\/\/doi.org\/10.1145\/crossmark-policy","source":"Crossref","is-referenced-by-count":0,"title":["Towards Understanding City-Level Routing using BGP Location Communities"],"prefix":"10.1145","volume":"3","author":[{"ORCID":"https:\/\/orcid.org\/0009-0006-3577-3531","authenticated-orcid":false,"given":"Thomas","family":"Krenc","sequence":"first","affiliation":[{"name":"IIJ Research Laboratory, Tokyo, Japan and UC San Diego, La Jolla, CA, USA"}]},{"ORCID":"https:\/\/orcid.org\/0009-0009-3534-881X","authenticated-orcid":false,"given":"Shivani","family":"Hariprasad","sequence":"additional","affiliation":[{"name":"UC San Diego, La Jolla, CA, USA"}]},{"ORCID":"https:\/\/orcid.org\/0000-0002-3872-4624","authenticated-orcid":false,"given":"Matthew","family":"Luckie","sequence":"additional","affiliation":[{"name":"UC San Diego, La Jolla, CA, USA"}]},{"ORCID":"https:\/\/orcid.org\/0000-0002-0651-3398","authenticated-orcid":false,"given":"Benoit","family":"Donnet","sequence":"additional","affiliation":[{"name":"University of Li\u00e8ge, Li\u00e8ge, Belgium"}]},{"ORCID":"https:\/\/orcid.org\/0000-0003-4824-3493","authenticated-orcid":false,"given":"kc","family":"Claffy","sequence":"additional","affiliation":[{"name":"UC San Diego, La Jolla, CA, USA"}]}],"member":"320","published-online":{"date-parts":[[2025,11,25]]},"reference":[{"key":"e_1_2_1_1_1","unstructured":"E. 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