Understanding the impact of internet exchange points on internet topology and routing performance

Abstract

The growth of Internet eXchange Points (IXPs) as an important component in the Internet Autonomous System (AS) level topology has led to the need for a detailed evaluation of their effect on Internet topology evolution and inter-domain packet routing. In this work, we carry out initial measurements to analyze the effect of the additional peering links and observe path quality in terms of round-trip time and loss rates of routes going through an IXP between pairs of Internet hosts. We observe significant effects of IXP-links on Internet growth and topology evolution while the routing performance points to numerous cases of Triangle Inequality Violations (TIVs) due to the IXP switches.