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International Conference on Passive and Active Network Measurement

PAM 2022: Passive and Active Measurement pp 338–366Cite as

Peering Only? Analyzing the Reachability Benefits of Joining Large IXPs Today

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Part of the book series: Lecture Notes in Computer Science ((LNCS,volume 13210))

Abstract

Internet Exchange Points (IXPs) became a fundamental building block of inter-domain routing throughout the last decade. Today, they offer their members access to hundreds—if not thousands—of possible networks to peer.

In this paper, we pose the question: How far can peering at those large IXPs get us in terms of reachable prefixes and services? To approach this question, we first analyze and compare Route Server snapshots obtained from eight of the world’s largest IXPs. Afterwards, we perform an in-depth analysis of bi-lateral and private peering at a single IXP based on its peering LAN traffic and queries to carefully selected, nearby looking glasses. To assess the relevance of the prefixes available via each peering type, we utilize two orthogonal metrics: the number of domains served from the prefix and the traffic volume that a large eyeball network egress towards it.

Our results show that multi-lateral peering can cover ~20% and ~40% of the routed IPv4 and IPv6 address space, respectively. We observe that many of those routes lead to out-of-continent locations reachable only via three or more AS hops. Yet, most IXP members only utilize “local” (i.e., single hop) routes. We further infer that IXP members can reach more than half of all routed IPv4 and more than one-third of all routed IPv6 address space via bi-lateral peering. These routes contain almost all of the top 10K egress prefixes of our eyeball network, and hence they would satisfy the reachability requirements of most end users. Still, they miss up to 20% of the top 10K prefixes that serve the most domains. We observe that these missing prefixes often belong to large transit and Tier 1 providers.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    A Route Server reduces the number of totally needed BGP sessions for a fully-meshed topology from \(n * (n-1)/2\) to n, where n is the number of BGP speakers.

  2. 2.

    As we obtained similar results for all Route Server related plots for a set of inital snapshots that we obtained throughout January and February, we do not expect any major inconsistencies due to a two week offset.

  3. 3.

    We neither had probing devices at other peering LANs, nor was our probing device at L-IXP IPv6-enabled at the time of our study.

  4. 4.

    We explicitly avoid the classification into remote and local peers based on RTT estimates alone given the caveats presented in [57].

  5. 5.

    We provide details on how we choose this time window in the next section.

  6. 6.

    As customers can potentially send traffic destined for the entire Internet to their transit providers, incorporating such connections would bloat up the set of reachableprefixes.

  7. 7.

    This order represents a conservative approach—if both the instruction to add AS X and to delete X are present, x will ultimately not be included in the set of Route Server peers.

  8. 8.

    If A and B exchange traffic in both directions, we treat the links (A, B) and (B, A) separately.

  9. 9.

    A result of multiple small waits between queries to different LGs in combination with the answer time of the other LGs.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. MPII, Saarbrücken, Germany

    Lars Prehn, Franziska Lichtblau, Christoph Dietzel & Anja Feldmann

  2. DE-CIX, Cologne, Germany

    Christoph Dietzel

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  1. Lars Prehn
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Correspondence to Lars Prehn .

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  1. Brandenburg University of Technology, Cottbus, Germany

    Oliver Hohlfeld

  2. SIDN Labs - TU Delft, Arnhem, The Netherlands

    Giovane Moura

  3. ICube - University of Strasbourg, Illkirch, France

    Cristel Pelsser

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Prehn, L., Lichtblau, F., Dietzel, C., Feldmann, A. (2022). Peering Only? Analyzing the Reachability Benefits of Joining Large IXPs Today. In: Hohlfeld, O., Moura, G., Pelsser, C. (eds) Passive and Active Measurement. PAM 2022. Lecture Notes in Computer Science, vol 13210. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-98785-5_15

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