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IXPs: mapped?

Published: 04 November 2009 Publication History

Abstract

Internet exchange points (IXPs) are an important ingredient of the Internet AS-level ecosystem - a logical fabric of the Internet made up of about 30,000 ASes and their mutual business relationships whose primary purpose is to control and manage the flow of traffic. Despite the IXPs' critical role in this fabric, little is known about them in terms of their peering matrices (i.e., who peers with whom at which IXP) and corresponding traffic matrices (i.e., how much traffic do the different ASes that peer at an IXP exchange with one another). In this paper, we report on an Internet-wide traceroute study that was specifically designed to shed light on the unknown IXP-specific peering matrices and involves targeted traceroutes from publicly available and geographically dispersed vantage points. Based on our method, we were able to discover and validate the existence of about 44K IXP-specific peering links - nearly 18K more links than were previously known. In the process, we also classified all known IXPs depending on the type of information required to detect them. Moreover, in view of the currently used inferred AS-level maps of the Internet that are known to miss a significant portion of the actual AS relationships of the peer-to-peer type, our study provides a new method for augmenting these maps with IXP-related peering links in a systematic and informed manner.

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cover image ACM Conferences
IMC '09: Proceedings of the 9th ACM SIGCOMM conference on Internet measurement
November 2009
468 pages
ISBN:9781605587714
DOI:10.1145/1644893
Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for components of this work owned by others than ACM must be honored. Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, or republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. Request permissions from [email protected]

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Publication History

Published: 04 November 2009

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Author Tags

  1. ixp
  2. peering
  3. traceroute

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IMC '09
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IMC '09: Internet Measurement Conference
November 4 - 6, 2009
Illinois, Chicago, USA

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  • (2024)Analyzing Remote Peering Deployment and Its Implications for Internet RoutingIEEE/ACM Transactions on Networking10.1109/TNET.2024.337589832:4(2950-2959)Online publication date: Aug-2024
  • (2023)Replication: 20 Years of Inferring Interdomain Routing PoliciesProceedings of the 2023 ACM on Internet Measurement Conference10.1145/3618257.3624799(16-29)Online publication date: 24-Oct-2023
  • (2023)Where is the Traffic Going? A Comparative Study of Clouds Following Different DesignsIEEE Transactions on Services Computing10.1109/TSC.2022.318204716:2(1473-1484)Online publication date: 1-Mar-2023
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  • (2022)Measures To Enhance The Characterization Of Internet Exchange Points2022 2nd International Conference on Electronic and Electrical Engineering and Intelligent System (ICE3IS)10.1109/ICE3IS56585.2022.10010180(169-173)Online publication date: 4-Nov-2022
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