research-article

O Peer, Where Art Thou?: Uncovering Remote Peering Interconnections at IXPs

Authors:

George Nomikos,

Vasileios Kotronis,

Pavlos Sermpezis,

Lefteris Manassakis,

Christoph Dietzel,

Stavros Konstantaras,

Xenofontas Dimitropoulos,

Vasileios GiotsasAuthors Info & Claims

IMC '18: Proceedings of the Internet Measurement Conference 2018

Pages 265 - 278

https://doi.org/10.1145/3278532.3278556

Published: 31 October 2018 Publication History

Abstract

Internet eXchange Points (IXPs) are Internet hubs that mainly provide the switching infrastructure to interconnect networks and exchange traffic. While the initial goal of IXPs was to bring together networks residing in the same city or country, and thus keep local traffic local, this model is gradually shifting. Many networks connect to IXPs without having physical presence at their switching infrastructure. This practice, called Remote Peering, is changing the Internet topology and economy, and has become the subject of a contentious debate within the network operators' community. However, despite the increasing attention it attracts, the understanding of the characteristics and impact of remote peering is limited. In this work, we introduce and validate a heuristic methodology for discovering remote peers at IXPs. We (i) identify critical remote peering inference challenges, (ii) infer remote peers with high accuracy (>95%) and coverage (93%) per IXP, and (iii) characterize different aspects of the remote peering ecosystem by applying our methodology to 30 large IXPs. We observe that remote peering is a significantly common practice in all the studied IXPs; for the largest IXPs, remote peers account for 40% of their member base. We also show that today, IXP growth is mainly driven by remote peering, which contributes two times more than local peering.

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O Peer, Where Art Thou?: Uncovering Remote Peering Interconnections at IXPs
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cover image ACM Conferences

IMC '18: Proceedings of the Internet Measurement Conference 2018

October 2018

507 pages

ISBN:9781450356190

DOI:10.1145/3278532

Copyright © 2018 ACM.

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SIGMETRICS: ACM Special Interest Group on Measurement and Evaluation
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Published: 31 October 2018

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IMC '18: Internet Measurement Conference

October 31 - November 2, 2018

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