IXPs: mapped?

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 ...

• Type: Conference
• Year: 2009
• Where: IMC
• Authors: Brice Augustin, Balachander Krishnamurthy, Walter Willinger
• Keywords: IMC 2009, Internet AS-level Ecosystem—a, Internet Technology, IXP-specific Peering Matrices, Peering Matrices