Dissecting the largest national ecosystem of public internet exchange points in Brazil

Abstract

Many efforts are devoted to increase the understanding of the complex and evolving Internet ecosystem. Internet eXchange Points (IXP) are shared infrastructures where Autonomous Systems (AS) implement peering agreements for their traffic exchange. In recent years, IXPs have become an increasing research target since they represent an interesting microcosm of the Internet diversity and a strategic vantage point to deliver end-user services. In this paper, we analyze the largest set of public IXPs in a single country, namely the IX.br project in Brazil. Our in-depth analyses are based on BGP data from all looking glass servers and provide insights into the peering ecosystem per IXP and from a nation-wide perspective. We propose a novel peering affinity metric wellsuited to measure the connectivity between different types of ASes. We found lower values of peering density in IX.br compared to more mature ecosystems, such as AMS-IX, DE-CIX, LINX, and MSK-IX. Our final contribution is sharing the 15GB dataset along all supporting code.