Internet eXchange Points: A Systematic Case Study in Indian Context

Abstract

AbstractAt present, Internet eXchange points (IXPs) drive the communication backbone of modern Internet, that allow the Internet to handle the high volume of data traffic. IXPs support critical infrastructures like clouds, data centers, and heterogeneous networks, and thus, it is predicted that the IXPs crossing traffic volume would reach 5016 exabytes by 2030. To cater to this high demand, researchers globally have addressed novel solutions of IXPs peering management, and service orchestration in clouds, data centers, and computational servers. IXP simplifies peering connections of different autonomous system (AS) by reducing the portion of Internet service providers (ISPs) traffic via upstream transit provider of latter, thereby minimizing data rate consumption cost. Although IXPs have been the resilient backbone of the modern Internet, research on the study of IXP is still in its early stages. In IXPs, the data packets follow an optimum path from source to reach to the destination through multiple hops via different AS networks. Thus, motivated by the aforementioned discussions, the article presents a systematic study of IXPs in the Indian context, and have analyzed the IXPs performance on publicly available data sets. We have presented comparative analysis in terms of connected AS average data rate, and user-level context bifurcations. Thus, the analysis intends to be a starting point for building smart solutions for the creation of robust IXPs that improves network services at a global scale.KeywordsInternetAutonomous systemsExchange pointsPeering linksCommunication services