A tale of nine Internet exchange points: Studying path latencies through major regional IXPs

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Abstract

The Internet ecosystem comprising of thousands of Autonomous Systems (ASes) now include Internet eXchange Points (IXPs) as another critical component in the infrastructure. With the growth of peering worldwide, IXPs are playing an increasing role not only in the topology evolution of the Internet but also inter-domain path routing. In this work, we first motivate the need to monitor popular exchange points based on geographical locations. These major IXPs are responsible for transmitting 43% of the total IXP traffic and hence play a significant role in determining the effects of peering at IXPs on path latencies. Using the most important route performance metric of end to end latency we then propose and implement a measurement framework to carry out an in-depth comparison of paths traversing an IXP with other available alternate paths. We observe the presence of a significant percentage of alternate paths outperforming the default route through an IXP in all major regions. Even though IXPs are set up primarily with economic benefits in mind, we conclude that there is a huge potential for improvement with more efficient routing and better planning at the primary IXPs around the world.