Characterizing User-to-User Connectivity with RIPE Atlas

TL;DR

This paper develops a method to analyze user-to-user connectivity within countries using RIPE Atlas probes, providing insights into interconnectivity of eyeball networks and enabling meaningful country comparisons.

Contribution

It introduces a focused approach on eyeball networks for interconnectivity analysis, enhancing the existing IXP Jedi framework with new measurement and visualization tools.

Findings

Preliminary estimation of RIPE Atlas coverage in eyeball networks

Development of the Eyeball Jedi tool for measuring and visualizing user interconnectivity

Enabling meaningful cross-country interconnectivity comparisons

Abstract

Characterizing the interconnectivity of networks at a country level is an interesting but non-trivial task. The IXP Country Jedi is an existing prototype that uses RIPE Atlas probes in order to explore interconnectivity at a country level, taking into account all Autonomous Systems (AS) where RIPE Atlas probes are deployed. In this work, we build upon this basis and specifically focus on "eyeball" networks, i.e. the user-facing networks with the largest user populations in any given country, and explore to what extent we can provide insights on their interconnectivity. In particular, with a focused user-to-user (and/or user-to-content) version of the IXP Country Jedi we work towards meaningful statistics and comparisons between countries/economies. This is something that a general-purpose probe-to-probe version is not able to capture. We present our preliminary work on the estimation of RIPE Atlas coverage in eyeball networks, as well as an approach to measure and visualize user interconnectivity with our Eyeball Jedi tool.