Shortcuts through Colocation Facilities

Network overlays, running on top of the existing Internet substrate, are of perennial value to Internet end-users in the context of, e.g., real-time applications. Such overlays can employ traffic relays to yield path latencies lower than the direct paths, a phenomenon known as Triangle Inequality Violation (TIV). Past studies identify the opportunities of reducing latency using TIVs. However, they do not investigate the gains of strategically selecting relays in Colocation Facilities (Colos). In this work, we answer the following questions: (i) how Colo-hosted relays compare with other relays as well as with the direct Internet, in terms of latency (RTT) reductions; (ii) what are the best locations for placing the relays to yield these reductions. To this end, we conduct a large-scale one-month measurement of inter-domain paths between RIPE Atlas (RA) nodes as endpoints, located at eyeball networks. We employ as relays Planetlab nodes, other RA nodes, and machines in Colos. We examine the RTTs of the overlay paths obtained via the selected relays, as well as the direct paths. We find that Colo-based relays perform the best and can achieve latency reductions against direct paths, ranging from a few to 100s of milliseconds, in 76% of the total cases; 75% (58% of total cases) of these reductions require only 10 relays in 6 large Colos.Comment: In Proceedings of the ACM Internet Measurement Conference (IMC '17), London, GB, 201

A Region-Centric Analysis of the Internet Peering Ecosystem

The Internet is transitioning from a hierarchical structure to a flat structure where more and more networks participate in public peering at IXPs and private peering at interconnection facilities to increase performance and reduce transit costs. PeeringDB is a public online database containing information about IXPs, facilities, and networks participating at IXPs and facilities. In this paper, we perform an in-depth analysis of the PeeringDB data to gain an understanding of the public and private peering ecosystems in the five regions of the world (i.e., North America, Europe, Asia Pacific, Latin America, and Africa). We study how IXPs, facilities, and peering networks are distributed across the five regions. We also investigate how distribution of network business type, peering policy, and traffic level varies across the five regions. Our analysis provides a snapshot of the current state of the peering ecosystems in the five regions of the world and reveals the similarities and differences between these peering ecosystems

Shaping the Internet: 10 Years of IXP Growth

Over the past decade, IXPs have been playing a key role in enabling interdomain connectivity. Their traffic volumes have grown dramatically and their physical presence has spread throughout the world. While the relevance of IXPs is undeniable, their long-term contribution to the shaping of the current Internet is not fully understood yet. In this paper, we look into the impact on Internet routes of the intense IXP growth over the last decade. We observe that while in general IXPs only have a small effect in path shortening, very large networks do enjoy a clear IXP-enabled path reduction. We also observe a diversion of the routes, away from the central Tier-1 ASes supported by IXPs. Interestingly, we also find that whereas IXP membership has grown, large and central ASes have steadily moved away from public IXP peerings, whereas smaller ones have embraced them. Despite all this changes, we find though that a clear hierarchy remains, with a small group of highly central network

The growing complexity of content delivery networks: Challenges and implications for the Internet ecosystem

Since the commercialization of the Internet, content and related applications, including video streaming, news, advertisements, and social interaction have moved online. It is broadly recognized that the rise of all of these different types of content (static and dynamic, and increasingly multimedia) has been one of the main forces behind the phenomenal growth of the Internet, and its emergence as essential infrastructure for how individuals across the globe gain access to the content sources they want. To accelerate the delivery of diverse content in the Internet and to provide commercial-grade performance for video delivery and the Web, Content Delivery Networks (CDNs) were introduced. This paper describes the current CDN ecosystem and the forces that have driven its evolution. We outline the different CDN architectures and consider their relative strengths and weaknesses. Our analysis highlights the role of location, the growing complexity of the CDN ecosystem, and their relationship to and implications for interconnection markets.EC/H2020/679158/EU/Resolving the Tussle in the Internet: Mapping, Architecture, and Policy Making/ResolutioNe

Open Connect Everywhere: A Glimpse at the Internet Ecosystem through the Lens of the Netflix CDN

The importance of IXPs to interconnect different networks and exchange traffic locally has been well studied over the last few years. However, far less is known about the role IXPs play as a platform to enable large-scale content delivery and to reach a world-wide customer base. In this paper, we study the infrastructure deployment of a content hypergiant, Netflix, and show that the combined worldwide IXP substrate is the major corner stone of its Content Delivery Network. To meet its worldwide demand for high-quality video delivery, Netflix has built a dedicated CDN. Its scale allows us to study a major part of the Internet ecosystem, by observing how Netflix takes advantage of the combined capabilities of IXPs and ISPs present in different regions. We find wide disparities in the regional Netflix deployment and traffic levels at IXPs and ISPs across various local ecosystems. This highlights the complexity of large-scale content delivery as well as differences in the capabilities of IXPs in specific regions. On a global scale we find that the footprint provided by IXPs allows Netflix to deliver most of its traffic directly from them. This highlights the additional role that IXPs play in the Internet ecosystem, not just in terms of interconnection, but also allowing players such as Netflix to deliver significant amounts of traffic

Mapping peering interconnections to a facility

Annotating Internet interconnections with robust physical coordinates at the level of a building facilitates network management including interdomain troubleshooting, but also has practical value for helping to locate points of attacks, congestion, or instability on the Internet. But, like most other aspects of Internet interconnection, its geophysical locus is generally not public; the facility used for a given link must be inferred to construct a macroscopic map of peering. We develop a methodology, called constrained facility search, to infer the physical interconnection facility where an interconnection occurs among all possible candidates. We rely on publicly available data about the presence of networks at different facilities, and execute traceroute measurements from more than 8,500 available measurement servers scattered around the world to identify the technical approach used to establish an interconnection. A key insight of our method is that inference of the technical approach for an interconnection sufficiently constrains the number of candidate facilities such that it is often possible to identify the specific facility where a given interconnection occurs. Validation via private communication with operators confirms the accuracy of our method, which outperforms heuristics based on naming schemes and IP geolocation. Our study also reveals the multiple roles that routers play at interconnection facilities; in many cases the same router implements both private interconnections and public peerings, in some cases via multiple Internet exchange points. Our study also sheds light on peering engineering strategies used by different types of networks around the globe

On the latency and routing impacts of remote peering to the Internet

Remote peering (RP) has crucially altered the Internet topology and its economics. In creasingly popular thanks to its lower costs and simplicity, RP has shifted the member base of Internet eXchange Points (IXPs) from strictly local to include ASes located any where in the world. While the popularity of RP is well understood, its implications on Internet routing and performance are not. In this thesis, we perform a comprehensive measurement study of RP in the wild, based on a representative set of IXPs (including some of the largest ones in the world, covering the five continents). We first identify the challenges of inferring remote peering and the limitations of the existing methodologies. Next, we perform active measurements to identify the deployment of remote IXP inter faces and announced prefixes in these IXPs, including a longitudinal analysis to observe RP growth over one and a half years. We use the RP inferences on IXPs to investigate whether RP routes announced at IXPs tend to be preferred over local ones and what are their latency and latency variability impacts when using different interconnection meth ods (remote peering, local peering, and transit) to deliver traffic. Next, we asses the RP latency impact when using a remote connection to international IXPs and reaching prefix destinations announced by their members. We perform measurements leveraging the in frastructure of a large Latin American RP reseller and compare the latency to reach IXP prefixes via RP and four Transit providers. Finally, we glimpse some of the RP impli cations on Internet routing. We evaluate how RP can considerably affect IXP members’ connection stability, potentially introduce routing detours caused by prefix announcement mispractices and be the target of traffic engineering by ASes using BGP communities

Quo vadis Open-IX?

ABSTRACT The recently launched initiative by the Open-IX Association (OIX) to establish the European-style Internet eXchange Point (IXP) model in the US suggests an intriguing strategy to tackle a problem that some Internet stakeholders in the US consider to be detrimental to their business; i.e., a lack of diversity in available peering opportunities. We examine in this paper the cast of Internet stakeholders that are bound to play a critical role in determining the fate of this Open-IX effort. These include the large content and cloud providers, CDNs, Tier-1 ISPs, the well-established and some of the newer commercial datacenter and colocation companies, and the largest IXPs in Europe. In particular, we comment on these different parties' current attitudes with respect to public and private peering and discuss some of the economic arguments that will ultimately determine whether or not the currently pursued strategy by OIX will succeed in achieving the main OIX-articulated goal -a more level playing field for private and public peering in the US such that the actual demand and supply for the different peering opportunities will be reflected in the cost structure