Internet Exchange Points Research Articles

Capture Beyond the Platforms: The Material and Infrastructural Conditions for Digital Journalism

News organisations are growing increasingly dependent on digital infrastructures for the distribution of news, AI implementation, and management of data. In this article, we argue that this dependency goes beyond the level of platforms, reaching into the internet backbone infrastructures that transmit, peer, deliver and host data on which journalism relies. Using Norway as a case, we map the actors involved in the subsea cable sectors, internet exchange points, content delivery networks and the data centres and cloud services that traffic, store and process digital journalism. Given the private, foreign nature of most of the actors involved in these infrastructures, we ask how these backbone infrastructures create interdependencies for the news industries in terms of data sovereignty, distribution control and regulatory jurisdiction. We discuss journalism’s dependency on each of these infrastructural sectors using sociotechnical theory, the contribution to which is to extend the range at which platform capture is considered in journalism scholarship.

Optimization of Network Management Resource in Internet Exchange Point (IXP) Implementation: Case Study of PT. Cloud Hosting Indonesia

Internet Exchange Point (IXP) is vital for global network development, supporting cloud computing and IoT trends. However, managing IXP networks is increasingly complex, impeding internet network growth. This research optimizes IXP network management by utilizing IXP Manager as the central infrastructure. Qualitative methods reveal limitations in BIRD configuration, confined to the Chief Technology Officer without a management platform. IXP Manager enables automation, empowering all technicians with performance graphs for evaluation, centralized management, improved employee performance, and enhanced device functionality. This approach fosters cost savings and supports the expansion of the internet network.

Азербайджанский цифровой центр: стратегия в действии

The article explores the digital transformation landscape under pandemic and post-pandemic conditions. As global internet traffic continues to surge, nations worldwide are prioritizing digital strategies to keep pace with this rapid transformation. Azerbaijan, an oil-rich country seeking economic diversification, has taken a strategic approach to become a key player in the digital landscape. Neqsol Holding, utilizing its capital from the oil and gas industry, initiated the Azerbaijan Digital Hub, a comprehensive program comprising the Digital Silk Road, a Regional Data Center, an Internet Exchange Point, and the development of a digital ecosystem. The hub aims to reshape the internet map along the Silk Way and thrive amidst disruptive changes through three consecutive stages: ideation, incubation, and scaling. The article highlights the strategic choices made by Azerbaijan in establishing the Digital Hub and its potential impact on the nation's economy. It presents the shift from the «Castles» quadrant to the «Connectors» quadrant, adopting new power models and values for sustainable growth. The dynamic capabilities of the Digital Hub are explored, emphasizing its transformative nature and adaptability to rapid technological advancements. In conclusion, the article suggests that the success of the Azerbaijan Digital Hub depends on effective management of continuous change, fostering a culture of innovation, and leveraging strategic advantages through mergers, alliances, and investments. By navigating a complex and uncertain environment, the Digital Hub can solidify its position as a crucial player in the digital era.

DDoS2Vec: Flow-Level Characterisation of Volumetric DDoS Attacks at Scale

Volumetric Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attacks have been a severe threat to the Internet for more than two decades. Some success in mitigation has been achieved based on numerous defensive techniques created by the research community, implemented by the industry, and deployed by network operators. However, evolution is not a privilege of mitigations, and DDoS attackers have found better strategies and continue to cause harm. A key challenge in winning this race is understanding the various characteristics of DDoS attacks in network traffic at scale and in a realistic manner. In this paper, we propose DDoS2Vec, a novel approach to characterise DDoS attacks in real-world Internet traffic using Natural Language Processing (NLP) techniques. DDoS2Vec is a domain-specific application of Latent Semantic Analysis that learns vector representations of potential DDoS attacks. We look into the link between natural language and computer network communication in a way that has not been previously studied. Our approach is evaluated on a large-scale dataset of flow samples collected from an Internet eXchange Point (IXP) in one year. We evaluate the performance of DDoS2Vec via multi-label classification in a Machine Learning (ML) scenario. DDoS2Vec characterises DDoS attacks more clearly than other baselines - including NLP-based approaches inspired by recent networks research and a basic non-NLP solution.

Proposed enhanced link failure rerouting mechanism for software-defined exchange point

Internet eXchange point (IXP) is a way to optimize network bandwidth. It enables a platform in the different providers like internet service providers (ISPs) and content delivery providers (CDNs) to share their traffic through a common point. A software defined exchange point (SDX) is an IXP comprising of a programmable deployed software defined network (SDN) switching fabric to enhance the management of their services, but they met the performance issues. The previous studies proposed various mechanisms and frameworks that tackled with these issues, but they don’t overcome overall challenges like link failure recovery for multi-hop-based SDX particularly packet processing delay and switch memory overhead. To cope with these issues, this paper proposed an enhanced link failure rerouting (ELFR) mechanism for multi-hop-based SDX. The objective of the proposed ELFR mechanism is to reduce the delay of packet processing to recover the link failure quickly and improve the path computation while ensuring the switch storage overhead. The present paper is an effort to retrospect and analyze the critical review of existing work for SDX. Furthermore, this paper provides a background of SDX, its components and its applications. Finally, this paper presents and compares the expected results of ELFR mechanism and related work.

Internet Exchange Point Network Implementation Using IXP Manager And Bird in Idcloudhost

Internet Exchange Point (IXP) is a network infrastructure providing facilities for connecting devices to exchange traffic. In building an IXP network, there are several main components: routers, switches, and IXP member devices. This research uses the UCLA method according to the scenario that has been made based on qualitative data from interviews with IDCloudHost. The research object is the IXP network owned by IDCloudHost, which was previously built using BIRD as the primary infrastructure in the form of a platform. This study aims to optimize the existing IXP network management process by re-implementing it using IXP Manager as the primary infrastructure. The research results show that the IXP network management process was done manually. BIRD configuration needed to be done on several different devices and could only be operated by IDCloudHost's Chief Technology Officer. The configuration process was done manually. After using IXP Manager, IXP network management on IDCloudHost Bogor configurations can generate automatically. All technicians operate the availability of IXP network performance graphs, which are more centralized and can. In addition, it also has an impact on the management process that can be carried out from a technical and administrative side, can be developed and integrated into various existing services at IDCloudHost, optimizes employee performance, and increases the maturity and business continuity of the company which means IXP network management at IDCloudHost can be optimized by using IXP Manager and BIRD

Providing High Internet Traffic Using IXPs during the COVID-19 and its Impact on DBP

During the decays of 21st century and the past century, the networks technology has witnessed huge and continuous improvements in terms of speed and dissemination, and the internet as well. On the other hand, the demand on internet services have dramatically becomes more, and that demand has been increased rapidly during the crisis of COVID-19. The demand on domestic bandwidth has been increased during and COVID-19 period, but what make things strange is that the demand after COVID is as the same as during the period of COVID, and some countries have exceeded the bandwidth range. To fulfill such high demand of bandwidth, governments have resorted to new technologies represented by the Internet Exchange Point (IXPs) as a replacement of traditional exchange points, in order to achieve high bandwidth and speed rate. This work represents the concept of IXP and its benefits, comparisons between countries that adopted this technology, and other comparisons to Arab Countries. It focuses on the demand of bandwidth in the world and the reasons of that demand stability during and after COVID period and the need for IXPs and how that affect the Domestic Broadband Production (DBP). As a result, most of developed countries have extended the IXPs in order to provide high bandwidth, but still Arab World not familiar with it. Adopting the IXPs has reflected on the DBP in general positively. Keywords-- COVID-19, IXP, DBP, Networks, Bandwidth.

Climate, infrastructure and the mediation of Miami: The spatial and discursive politics of the Network Access Point of the Americas

The Network Access Point of the Americas, housed in a massive 750,000 square foot structure in downtown Miami, is both data centre and internet exchange point, funnelling informational traffic from and among the United States, Central and South America and the Caribbean to more than 148 countries around the world. In addition to looking at it as a key piece of informational infrastructure, the analysis of the NAP presented in this article unpacks it as both a part of the built environment in Miami and a fantastic discursive production, a work of narrative-making in the city and the larger world. The ecocritical approach of this study includes a visual analysis of the NAP, a textual analysis of the promotional materials Equinix, its owner, produces about it and a situation of this data centre and internet exchange point within the development history and contemporary position of downtown Miami.

Code Ethnography and the Materiality of Power in Internet Governance

The purpose of this article is to discuss an ethnography of code, specifically code ethnography, a method for examining code as a socio-technical actor, considering its social, political, and economic dynamics in the context of digital infrastructures. While it can be applied to any code, the article presents the results of code ethnography application in the study of internet interconnection dynamics, having the Border Gateway Protocol (BGP) as code and two of the largest internet exchange points (IXPs) in the world as points of data collection, DE-CIX Frankfurt, and IX.br São Paulo. The results show inequalities in the flows of information between the global North and the global South and concentration of power at the level of interconnection infrastructure hitherto unknown in the context of the political economy of the internet. Code ethnography is explained in terms of code assemblage, code literacy, and code materiality. It demonstrates the grammar of BGP in context, making its logical and physical dimensions visible in the analysis of the formation of giant internet nodes and infrastructural interdependencies in the circulation information infrastructure of the internet.

Toward Next-Generation and Service-Defined Networks: A NovaGenesis Control Agent for Future Internet Exchange Point

The Internet has modified how we interact with the world, disrupting our leisure, work model, and economy. Nonetheless, it presents an ossified architecture and infrastructure that may burden future applications. These limitations have led to the development of future Internet architectures (FIAs), for example, NovaGenesis (NG). Considering recent trend topics such as next-generation networks, software-defined networking, service virtualization, and 5G network slicing, the coexistence of disjointed architectures in a multi-architectural network is the key to supporting applications with diverse requirements. In this article, we present NG data and control planes for a programming protocol-independent packet processor (P4)-based future Internet exchange point (FIXP). This proposal advances the state of the art by delivering a native and efficient NG controller that manages a multi-architecture exchange point on the fly. In this article, the NG controller prototype orchestrates a simulated autonomous system with FIXP to connect NG hosts (and its content distribution application) dynamically. The obtained results validate the solution.

Estimating the effects of Internet exchange points on fixed-broadband speed and latency

The present paper provides estimates of the relationship between the number of Internet exchange points (IXPs) and fixed-broadband speed and latency in 74 countries from 2016 to 2019, using a balanced panel data set developed by the Economist Intelligence Unit for its “Inclusive Internet Index”. While in several studies, a positive role of IXPs on Internet speed and latency is established, a majority of the earlier ones are technical studies examining the traffic routes in specific networks. This paper contributes to this literature by triangulating earlier findings using an econometric model. The recent availability of the panel data set on IXPs, speed and latency by the Economist Intelligence Unit has made this exercise possible.

GLOBAL CONNECTIVTY REPORT 2022. CHAPTERS 3-4. ACCELERATING PROGRESS TOWARDS UNIVERSAL AND MEANINGFUL CONNECTIVITY & THE CRITICAL ROLE OF MIDDLE-MILE CONNECTIVITY

The Global Connectivity Report 2022 takes stock of the progress in digital connectivity over the past three decades. It provides a detailed assessment of the current state of connectivity and how close the world is to achieving universal and meaningful connectivity, using a unique analytical framework. It goes on to showcase solutions and good practices to accelerate progress. The second part of the report consists of seven thematic deep dives on infrastructure, affordability, financing, the pandemic, regulation, youth, and data. Chapter 3 explores options to accelerate progress towards universal and meaningful connectivity. Expanding broadband networks is needed to eliminate the remaining blind spots and improve the quality of connectivity. Measures include reducing constraints on foreign direct investment to attract capital for upgrading and expanding digital infrastructure; ensuring sound ICT sector regulation to help build competitive markets and enhance predictability; promoting infrastructure sharing to reduce costs; ensuring the supply of adequate, inexpensive spectrum to help reduce coverage gaps; and ensuring sufficient capacity and a shift to new generations of mobile broadband. Solutions to ensure an adequate energy provision to power ICT infrastructure include policy incentives, reducing duties and taxes on green power equipment and allowing independent power producers. Chapter 4 explores the importance of middle-mile connectivity as countries develop digital economies – achieving better quality, lower costs and greater redundancy. The “middle mile” consists of infrastructure responsible for storing and exchanging data. It is an overlooked yet critical link in the connectivity chain, between international connectivity – or “first-mile” connectivity – and “last-mile” connectivity, made of the infrastructure that connects the users, which is hence more visible and tangible. The three key components of a domestic data infrastructure ecosystem are Internet exchange points (IXPs), data centres and cloud computing.

An insight into internet sector in Iraq

The internet is considered to be the most advanced technology today and a gateway to modern communication and the sharing of information, products, services, and technology. Nowadays, users want to be able to access anywhere and anytime several services and applications, which is increasing data traffic and triggering a mobile data explosion. Iraq has major problems in increasing the growth and use of the internet and changing the standard method of communication. This is a big challenge, however, since there are several variables that characterize this phase of transformation. In this paper, the problems, vision, and solutions are presented in details. This study aims to clarify the factors of internet use in Iraq by the use of an acceptable approach and by suggesting new solutions for all the presented problems. This work also, clarify the expected traffic and the mechanism to transform the traffic between local ISP’s networks (AS) internet exchange points.

The Ethiopian telecom industry: gaps and recommendations towards meaningful connectivity and a thriving digital ecosystem

Ethiopia, the second-most populous country in Africa with 110 million inhabitants, has one of the oldest public telecommunication operators established in 1894. Despite its age, Ethiopian telecommunication remains one of the least developed in the world. According to ITU, in 2019, mobile-cellular subscription (per 100 people) was 39 % and 20 % Internet penetration. As of June 2018, the international transmission speed per Internet user was two kbits/s. Different studies widely acknowledge that no modern economy can be developed short of telecommunication services. It is no wonder that Ethiopia is depicted as one of the weakest economies in the world. This paper identifies the causes for extraordinarily poor telecommunications service in Ethiopia and offers recommendations for near-term improvement. The approach considered includes existing work surveys and document examination, and to this end, the work has relied primarily on secondary data sources. Inexperienced and ineffectual regulatory oversight, absence of facilities-based competition, inadequate interconnection with the neighboring nation's networks, and inability to localize outbound traffics are identified as factors affecting the Ethiopian telecom industry performance. Full liberalization with an effective regulatory body and hosting a sizeable Internet Exchange Points (IXPs) are recommended for better connectivity and a thriving digital ecosystem in Ethiopia.

Ethiopian Telecom Industry: Gaps and Recommendations Towards a Meaningful Connectivity and a Thriving Digital Eco-System

Ethiopia, the second-most populous country in Africa with 110 million inhabitants, has one of the oldest public telecommunication operators established in 1894. Despite its age, Ethiopian telecommunication remains one of the least developed in the world. According to ITU, in 2019, mobile-cellular subscription (per 100 people) was 39%, and 20% internet penetration. And as of June 2018, the international transmission speed per internet user was two kbits/s. Different studies widely acknowledge that no modern economy can be developed short of telecommunication services. It is, therefore, no wonder that nowadays Ethiopia is depicted as one of the weakest economies of the world. This paper will identify causes for the extraordinarily poor telecommunications service in Ethiopia and offer recommendations for near-term improvement.The approach considered in this study includes existing works survey and document examination; and to this end, this work relied primarily on secondary sources of data. After analyzing data collected from various sources, the paper identifies several reasons for Ethiopia’s low subscribership and network performance. Such factors include inexperienced and ineffectual regulatory oversight, the absence of facilities-based competition, inadequate interconnection with the networks located in adjacent nations, and the inability to localize outbound traffic. Upon identifying the above listed factors, the paper suggested the following recommendations for Ethiopian telecom industry stakeholders. First and foremost, the Ethiopian telecom market needs full liberalization with an independent and efficient regulatory body establishment. Since massive investment is required to improve last-mile, middle-mile and first-mile connectivity, mobilizing investment from various stakeholders is crucial. In addition to this, Ethiopia must host sizeable Internet Exchange Points (IXPs) to improve interconnection among countries within the continent.

SD-BROV: An Enhanced BGP Hijacking Protection with Route Validation in Software-Defined eXchange

In global networks, Border Gateway Protocol (BGP) is widely used in exchanging routing information. While the original design of BGP did not focus on security protection against deliberate or accidental errors regarding to routing disruption, one of fundamental vulnerabilities in BGP is a lack of insurance in validating authority for announcing network layer reachability. Therefore, a distributed repository system known as Resource Public Key Infrastructure (RPKI) has been utilized to mitigate this issue. However, such a validation requires further deployment steps for Autonomous System (AS), and it might cause performance and compatibility problems in legacy network infrastructure. Nevertheless, with recent advancements in network innovation, some traditional networks are planning to be restructured with Software-Defined Networking (SDN) technology for gaining more benefits. By using SDN, Internet eXchange Point (IXP) is able to enhance its capability of management by applying softwarized control methods, acting as a Software-Defined eXchange (SDX) center to handle numerous advertisement adaptively. To use the SDN method to strengthen routing security of IXP, this paper proposed an alternative SDX development, SD-BROV, an SDX-based BGP Route Origin Validation mechanism that establishes a flexible route exchange scenario with RPKI validation. The validating application built in the SDN controller is capable of investigating received routing information. It aims to support hybrid SDN environments and help non-SDN BGP neighbors to get trusted routes and drop suspicious ones in transition. To verify proposed idea with emulated environment, the proof-of-concept development is deployed on an SDN testbed running over Research and Education Networks (RENs). During BGP hijacking experiment, the results show that developed SD-BROV is able to detect and stop legitimate traffic to be redirected by attacker, making approach to secure traffic forwarding on BGP routers.

Machine Learning Classification and Regression Approaches for Optical Network Traffic Prediction

Rapid growth of network traffic causes the need for the development of new network technologies. Artificial intelligence provides suitable tools to improve currently used network optimization methods. In this paper, we propose a procedure for network traffic prediction. Based on optical networks’ (and other network technologies) characteristics, we focus on the prediction of fixed bitrate levels called traffic levels. We develop and evaluate two approaches based on different supervised machine learning (ML) methods—classification and regression. We examine four different ML models with various selected features. The tested datasets are based on real traffic patterns provided by the Seattle Internet Exchange Point (SIX). Obtained results are analyzed using a new quality metric, which allows researchers to find the best forecasting algorithm in terms of network resources usage and operational costs. Our research shows that regression provides better results than classification in case of all analyzed datasets. Additionally, the final choice of the most appropriate ML algorithm and model should depend on the network operator expectations.

Technical perspective: Tracking pandemic-driven internet traffic

The Internet is a research experiment that escaped from the lab to become a critical global communications infrastructure during our lifetimes. Over the past year of the COVID-19 pandemic, the Internet has supported friends and families staying in touch and supporting each other, remote work and learning, and the global collaboration of experts designing much-needed treatments and vaccines. As challenging as the past year (and more) has been, the Internet has made it possible for many important aspects of life, work, and culture to continue. The following paper offers a detailed look at how Internet traffic changed during the COVID-19 pandemic. The paper is distinctive in analyzing traffic measurements from multiple networks--ISPs, three major Internet exchange points, a mobile provider, and a university network--across a long period of time.

DeSI: A Decentralized Software-Defined Network Architecture for Internet Exchange Points

Applications of Software-Defined Networking (SDN) to the Internet Routing hold great promises for supporting the ever-growing performance requirements of Internet applications. The inherent centralization of these SDN approaches on the Internet routing comes with the following concerns: 1) <italic xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">privacy</i> , the operators are reluctant to share private routing information, 2) <italic xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">separation of responsibilities</i> , the Internet eXchange Point (IXP) running the centralized controller is involved in the routing and forwarding at too many levels, and 3) <italic xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">scalability</i> , the growing number of IP prefixes routed on the Internet (i.e., hundreds of thousands) pose extremely high requirements at both the control- and data-planes, e.g., several minutes for policy compilations and a large number of forwarding rules, in SDN. In this paper, we propose <sc xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">DeSI</small> to apply SDN at IXPs by considering the above concerns. We break this centralization by devising an SDN-enabled IXP architecture in which each member connects to an SDN-enabled IXP through its SDN controller and SDN switches, thus tackling privacy, scalability, and separation of concerns issues. To spur adoption, we introduce an expressive, yet simple, language to configure the routing policies of the members. Our evaluation shows that <sc xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">DeSI</small> needs <italic xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">n</i> times fewer forwarding table entries for an IXP in which <italic xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">n</i> is the number of IXP members. <sc xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">DeSI</small> also gives the possibility of slowly migrating to the SDN-enabled IXPs.

Forming Better Stable Solutions in Group Formation Games Inspired by Internet Exchange Points (IXPs)

We study a coordination game motivated by the formation of Internet Exchange Points (IXPs), in which agents choose which facilities to join. Joining the same facility as other agents you communicate with has benefits, but different facilities have different costs for each agent. Thus, the players wish to join the same facilities as their "friends", but this is balanced by them not wanting to pay the cost of joining a facility. We first show that the Price of Stability (PoS) of this game is at most 2, and more generally there always exists an alpha-approximate equilibrium with cost at most 2/alpha of optimum. We then focus on how better stable solutions can be formed. If we allow agents to pay their neighbors to prevent them from deviating (i.e., a player i voluntarily pays another player j so that j joins the same facility), then we provide a payment scheme which stabilizes the solution with minimum social cost s*, i.e. PoS is 1. In our main technical result, we consider how much a central coordinator would have to pay the players in order to form good stable solutions. Let Delta denote the total amount of payments needed to be paid to the players in order to stabilize s*, i.e., these are payments that a player would lose if they changed their strategy from the one in s*. We prove that there is a tradeoff between Delta and the Price of Stability: Delta/cost(s*) &lt; 1 - 2 PoS/5. Thus when there are no good stable solutions, only a small amount of extra payment is needed to stabilize s*; and when good stable solutions already exist (i.e., PoS is small), then we should be happy with those solutions instead. Finally, we consider the computational complexity of finding the optimum solution s*, and design a polynomial time O(log n) approximation algorithm for this problem.