Tracking the evolution of intra-African traffic localization (Remote talk)
Based on paris-traceroutes data collected from RIPE Atlas probes (from Nov. 2013 to Apr. 2014; Ju... more Based on paris-traceroutes data collected from RIPE Atlas probes (from Nov. 2013 to Apr. 2014; June 2014 to Aug. 2014, and from Nov. 2014 to Feb. 2015), we tracked the evolution of intra-African traffic localization. We indeed looked for IXPs traversed by the AS paths, using information collected from public datasets (PeeringDB, PCHdata, IXP websites, etc.). We then evaluated the impacts of peering on the minimum RTT among ASes and compare the Quality of Service experienced by random end-users in Africa, Europe, and North America for communications between same countries. After that, we presented a web platform displaying statistics such as the IP paths between any probe source and destination, the minimum RTT heat-map between any probes pair, the discovered IXPs in the dataset, etc. Such an application would allow stakeholders and engineers to have a view of the impact of their routing policies on the QoS experienced by end-users. We aim to get feedbacks from the AFPIF community be...
Proceedings of the 2017 Internet Measurement Conference, 2017
The goal of this work is to investigate the prevalence, causes, and impact of congestion on the A... more The goal of this work is to investigate the prevalence, causes, and impact of congestion on the African IXP substrate. Towards this end, we deployed Ark probes (within networks peering) at six African IXPs and ran the time-sequence latency probes (TSLP) algorithm, thereby collecting latency measurements to both ends of each mapped AS link for a whole year. We were able to detect congestion events and quantify their periods and magnitudes at four IXPs. We then verified the events and investigated the causes by interviewing the IXP operators. Our results show that only 2.2% of the discovered IP links experienced (sustained or transient) congestion during our measurement period. Our findings suggest the need for ISPs to carefully monitor the provision of their peering links, so as to avoid or quickly mitigate the occurrence of congestion. Regulators may also define the maximum level of packet loss in those links to provide some protection to communications routed through local IXPs.
Assessing peering evolution in Africa (Remote talk)
There is a lack of knowledge on how ASes have been behaving at African IXPs from 2005 up to now, ... more There is a lack of knowledge on how ASes have been behaving at African IXPs from 2005 up to now, the period those IXPs have been existing for, their richness in term of reachable ASes or prefixes, etc. To correct this situation, we collected and analyzed PCH data from 2005-2015 which involve 12 African IXPs in Africa, including JINX and KIXP (known to host RouteViews Collector). The analysis of such data reveals some interesting metrics per IXP, namely the time difference between prefix allocation (AFRINIC DB) and appearance on the Internet (RIS data/RIPE stats), the time difference between prefix allocation (AFRINIC DB) and appearance at an IXP (PCH data), the number of prefixes visible at each IXP, Origin ASN and Prefix growth stats per year for each IXP, and etc. We presented the results during this talk.
Over the last years, an extensive amount of initiatives has been taken by African telecom actors ... more Over the last years, an extensive amount of initiatives has been taken by African telecom actors to increase the number of high capacity backbones, and interconnection infrastructures such as Internet eXchange Points. The goal of this work is to shed light on the state of inter-domain routing in the continent, and monitor its evolution. For this purpose, we deployed 18 RIPE Atlas probes in 11 countries, targeting ISPs where no probes were present. We performed active measurements among a total 116 similar probes hosted in 63 ISPs, covering 28 countries. The measurement campaign lasted 4 months. We provide the first snapshot of the Intra-African Internet connectivity, and highlight its characteristics. Our results show a large proportion of long paths, in terms of number of intermediate ISPs and Round Trip Times, even for pairs of ASes located in the same region, or even country. Approximately 80% of the paths between our monitored AS pairs were found to be served via other continent...
§ The African interdomain topology is quite stable over time § Observing it from a couple of lo... more § The African interdomain topology is quite stable over time § Observing it from a couple of location gives a biased view § Lack of interconnection among African ISPs (ZA being an exception) • ZA is adopted as a hub for West-East communications • IXPs in ZA appears on 58% paths traversing ZA § Long AS paths and RTTs, sometimes among ISPs in the region or country § Transit habits vary throughout the continent § Frequent usage of IXPs such as JINX, DINX, CINX, NAPAfrica, etc § Emergence of new IXPs, first benefits of initiatives promoting peering Dataset treatment § IP to AS mapping with TC • 164 Ases classified in WAf, EAf, SAf, RAf, Int § Raw data Sanity check
This work aims at designing and implementing a system able to profile and help manage the set of ... more This work aims at designing and implementing a system able to profile and help manage the set of IXPs in an Internet region. As part of the Internet Society's strategy to help monitor and understand the evolution of IXPs in a particular region, a route-collector data analyzer tool was developed before being deployed and tested in AfriNIC. In fact, traffic localization efforts in the African peering ecosystem would be more sustained and their efficacy assessed if they were supported by a platform, which evaluates and reports in real-time about their impact on the Internet. We thus built the "African" Route-collectors Data Analyzer (ARDA), an open source web platform for analyzing publicly available routing information collected since 2005 by local route-collectors. ARDA evaluates pre-defined metrics that picture the status of the interconnection at local, national, and regional levels. It shows that a small proportion of AfriNIC ASes (roughly 17 %) are peering in the region. Through them, 58 % of all African networks are visible at one IXP or more. These have been static from April to September 2017, and even February 2018, underlining the need for increased efforts to improve local interconnectivity. We show how ARDA can help detect the impact of policies on the growth of local IXPs, or continually provide the community with up-to-date empirical data on the evolution of the IXP substrate. Given its features, this tool will be a helpful compass for stakeholders in the quest for better traffic localization and new interconnection opportunities in the targeted region.
There is an increasing awareness amongst developing regions on the importance of localizing Inter... more There is an increasing awareness amongst developing regions on the importance of localizing Internet traffic in the quest for fast, affordable, and available Internet access. In this paper, we focus on Africa, where 37 IXPs are currently interconnecting local ISPs, but mostly at the country level. An option to enrich connectivity on the continent and incentivize content providers to establish presence in the region is to interconnect ISPs present at isolated IXPs by creating a distributed IXP layout spanning the continent. The goal of this paper is to investigate whether such IXP interconnection would be possible, and if successful, to estimate the best-case benefits that could be realized in terms of traffic localization and performance. Our hope is that quantitatively demonstrating the benefits will provide incentives for ISPs to intensify their peering relationships in the region. However, it is challenging to estimate this best-case scenario, due to numerous economic, political, and geographical factors influencing the region. Towards this end, we begin with a thorough analysis of the environment in Africa. We then investigate a naive approach to IXP interconnection, which shows that a theoretically optimal solution would be infeasible in practice due to the prevailing socioeconomic conditions in the region. We therefore provide an innovative, realistic four-step interconnection scheme to achieve the distributed IXP layout that considers and parameterizes external socioeconomic factors using publicly available datasets. We demonstrate that our constrained solution doubles the percentage of continental intra-African paths, reduces their lengths, and drastically decreases the median of their RTTs as well as RTTs to ASes hosting the top 10 global and top 10 regional Alexa websites. Our approach highlights how, given real-world constraints, a solution requires careful considerations in order to be practically realizable.
Despite extensive studies on the Internet topology, little is still known about the AS level topo... more Despite extensive studies on the Internet topology, little is still known about the AS level topology of the African Internet, especially when it comes to its IXP substrate. The main reason for this is the lack of vantage points that are needed to obtain the proper information. From 2013 to 2016, we enhanced the RIPE Atlas measurement infrastructure in the region to shed light on both IPv4 and IPv6 topologies interconnecting local ISPs. We increased the number of vantage points in Africa by 278.3% and carried out measurements between them at random periods. To infer results that depict the behavior of ISPs in the region, we propose reproducible traceroute data analysis techniques suitable for the treatment of any set of similar measurements. We first reveal a large variety of ISP transit habits and their dependence on socioeconomic factors. We then compare QoS within African countries, European countries, and the US to find that West African networks in particular need to promote investments in fiber networks and to implement traffic engineering techniques. Our results indicate the remaining dominance of ISPs based outside Africa for the provision of intra-continental paths, but also shed light on traffic localization efforts. We map, in our traceroute data, 62.2% of the IXPs in Africa and infer their respective peers. Finally, we highlight the launch of new IXPs and quantify their impacts on end-to-end connectivity. The study clearly demonstrates that to better assess interdomain routing in a continent, it is necessary to perform measurements from a diversified range of vantage points.
Proceedings of the 25th International Conference on World Wide Web, 2016
It is well known that Africa's mobile and fixed Internet infrastructure is progressing at a rapid... more It is well known that Africa's mobile and fixed Internet infrastructure is progressing at a rapid pace. A flurry of recent research has quantified this, highlighting the expansion of its underlying connectivity network. However, improving the infrastructure is not useful without appropriately provisioned services to utilise it. This paper measures the availability of web content infrastructure in Africa. Whereas others have explored web infrastructure in developed regions, we shed light on practices in developing regions. To achieve this, we apply a comprehensive measurement methodology to collect data from a variety of sources. We focus on a large content delivery network to reveal that Africa's content infrastructure is, indeed, expanding. However, we find much web content is still served from the US and Europe. We discover that many of the problems faced are actually caused by significant inter-AS delays in Africa, which contribute to local ISPs not sharing their cache capacity. We discover that a related problem is the poor DNS configuration used by some ISPs, which confounds the attempts of providers to optimise their delivery. We then explore a number of other websites to show that large web infrastructure deployments are a rarity in Africa and that even regional websites host their services abroad. We conclude by making suggestions for improvements.
With IP networking booming in Africa, promotion of BGP peering in the region emerge, and changes ... more With IP networking booming in Africa, promotion of BGP peering in the region emerge, and changes in the transit behavior of ISPs serving Africa are expected. However, little is known about the IP transit topology currently forming the African Internet. Enhancing the RIPE Atlas infrastructure, we evaluate the topology interconnecting ISPs based on the continent. We reveal a variety of ISP transit habits, depending on a range of factors such as the official language or the business profile of the ISP. We highlight the emergence of IXPs in Africa, evaluating its impact on end-to-end connectivity. Our results however emphasize the remaining dominance of ISPs based outside Africa, for the provision of intracontinental paths. We study the impact of this aspect on AS path length and endto-end delay. Such results illustrate that performing measurements from a broad, diversified, range of vantage points is necessary to assess interdomain routing on the continent.
It is well known that internet infrastructure deployment is progressing at a rapid pace in the Af... more It is well known that internet infrastructure deployment is progressing at a rapid pace in the African continent. A flurry of recent research has quantified this, highlighting the expansion of its underlying connectivity network. However, improving the infrastructure is not useful without appropriately provisioned services to exploit it. This article measures the availability and utilisation of web infrastructure in Africa. Whereas others have explored web infrastructure in developed regions, we shed light on practices in developing regions. To achieve this, we apply a comprehensive measurement methodology to collect data from a variety of sources. We first focus on Google to reveal that its content infrastructure in Africa is, indeed, expanding. That said, we find that much of its web content is still served from the US and Europe, despite being the most popular website in many African countries. We repeat the same analysis across a number of other regionally popular websites to fi...
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Papers by Roderick Fanou