Anatomy of a Large European IXP
ABSTRACT. This paper reports on a first-of-its-kind and in-depth analysis of one of the largest IXPs worldwide based on nine months’ worth of sFlow records collected at that IXP in 2011.
A main finding of our study is that the number of actual peering links at this single IXP exceeds the number of total AS links of the peer-peer type in the entire Internet known as of 2010!
The basic role of Internet eXchange Points (IXPs) dates back to the establishment of Network Access Points (NAPs) as part of the decommissioning of the National Science Foundation Network (NSFNET) around 1994/95, a carefully orchestrated plan for transitioning the NSFNET backbone service to private industry.
In fact, large IXPs such as AMS-IX, situated in Amsterdam, and DE-CIX,
in Frankfurt, offer
2.1 IXP overview
- The main business model of an IXP
- operate and manage a physical infrastructure in support of public and private Internet interconnection.
- the public part of an IXP’s infrastructure
- the IXP’s revenues derive mainly from selling network interfaces or ports to customer networks (i.e., ASes) and supporting different types of interconnection arrangements
- A member AS
- gain network connectivity to all other members of the IXP … interconnection arrangements reflect bi-lateral agreements between a pair of member ASes
- these networks may want to impose certain conditions to ensure that they connect only to certain other networks or connect with them in ways that reflect their business model and support their market strategies.
2.2 IXP infrastructure and data
the infrastructure (a) of this large IXP is typical
- IXP’s operation
- IXP provides a layer-2 switching fabric and each of the member ASes connects its access router to that switching fabric. When a pair of member ASes decides to peer at the IXP, they establish a BGP session between their access routers which, in turn, enables the exchange of IP traffic over this peering link across the IXP’s infrastructure.
2.4 Membership and traffic statistics
(b)