Abstract
With IP networking booming in Africa, promotion of BGP peering in the region emerge, and changes in the transit behavior of ISPs serving Africa are expected. However, little is known about the IP transit topology currently forming the African Internet. Enhancing the RIPE Atlas infrastructure, we evaluate the topology interconnecting ISPs based on the continent. We reveal a variety of ISP transit habits, depending on a range of factors such as the official language or the business profile of the ISP. We highlight the emergence of IXPs in Africa, evaluating its impact on end-to-end connectivity. Our results however emphasize the remaining dominance of ISPs based outside Africa, for the provision of intra-continental paths. We study the impact of this aspect on AS path length and end-to-end delay. Such results illustrate that performing measurements from a broad, diversified, range of vantage points is necessary to assess interdomain routing on the continent.
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Notes
- 1.
In this paper, we refer to countries using ISO 2-letter country codes, that we list in [15].
- 2.
The raw data for these delay measurements can be found in [15].
- 3.
We categorized the WAf ASes as public or private, based on gathered private information.
- 4.
As of December 10, 2014, the RIPE Atlas platform has evolved to 318 probes hosted in 147 ASes and spread across 44 countries all over Africa [7].
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Acknowledgement
We are grateful to whoever deploys or hosts a RIPE Atlas probe. We also thank Michuki Mwangi, Nishal Goburdhan, Vesna Manojlovic, Andra Lutu, Camilo Cardona, Ignacio De Castro, and Pablo Camarillo for their insightful comments.
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Fanou, R., Francois, P., Aben, E. (2015). On the Diversity of Interdomain Routing in Africa. In: Mirkovic, J., Liu, Y. (eds) Passive and Active Measurement. PAM 2015. Lecture Notes in Computer Science(), vol 8995. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-15509-8_4
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