Deep Diving into Africa's Inter-Country Latencies

Formoso, Agustín; Chavula, Josiah; Phokeer, Amreesh; Sathiaseelan, Arjuna; Tyson, Gareth

doi:10.1109/infocom.2018.8486024

Cited by 27 publications

(19 citation statements)

References 19 publications

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“…Further, no content provider caches are available at the IXP, again forcing the peers to reach popular content after tromboning through expensive transit links. All these translate into poor QoS for their end users, as quantified in the following measurements studies …”

Section: Implementation Of Arda and Resultsmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Since Internet connectivity appears to be a lever of development in connected areas, there is an increasing interest from the Internet community in continually characterizing local interconnection in underconnected regions for efficiently helping them improve. Meanwhile, Internet Service Providers (ISPs) are more and more interested in acquiring updated details about the current situation to identify potential positioning opportunities in those geographical areas …”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

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A system for profiling the IXPs in a region and monitoring their growth: Spotlight at the internet frontier

et al. 2018

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This work aims at designing and implementing a system able to profile and help manage the set of Internet eXchange Points (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 predefined 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.

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Section: Implementation Of Arda and Resultsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

A system for profiling the IXPs in a region and monitoring their growth: Spotlight at the internet frontier

et al. 2018

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“…Africa has a couple countries that show substantial improvement from the use of the private WAN over the public Internet, and a few where the public Internet is significantly better, but most have only a slight improvement. The results may stem from the internal structure of the African continent's Internet [39]. Surprisingly, Asia and Oceania show both the most benefit from using the private WAN (Figs.…”

Section: B Latency By Countrymentioning

confidence: 97%

(How Much) Does a Private WAN Improve Cloud Performance?

Arnold

Gurmericliler

Essig

et al. 2020

IEEE INFOCOM 2020 - IEEE Conference on Computer Communications

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The construction of private WANs by cloud providers enables them to extend their networks to more locations and establish direct connectivity with end user ISPs. Tenants of the cloud providers benefit from this proximity to users, which is supposed to provide improved performance by bypassing the public Internet. However, the performance impact of cloud providers' private WANs is not widely understood. To isolate the impact of a private WAN, we measure from globally distributed vantage points to two large cloud providers, comparing performance when using their worldwide WAN and when instead using the public Internet. The benefits are not universal. While 48% of our vantage points saw improved performance when using the WAN, 43% had statistically indistinguishable median performance, and 9% had better performance over the public Internet. We find that the benefits of the private WAN tend to improve with client-to-server distance, but the benefits (or drawbacks) for a particular vantage point depend on specifics of its geographic and network connectivity. Google Server Undetected Border Border (using private WAN) Europe-West Border (using public Internet) US-East Border (using public Internet) US-Central Border (using public Internet) Asia-Northeast Border (using public Internet)

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“…Zaki et al [22] measured webpage loading performance for users in Ghana and found that DNS resolution delay is the largest contributor. Recently, Formoso et al [23] used measurements collected by SpeedChecker to quantify inter-country latency in Africa while Fanou et al [24] employed RIPE Atlas to dissect the web ecosystem in Africa revealing that most of the content accessed by users in Africa is still served from outside the continent. With regards to application-level measurements, Phokeer et al [25] ran a quality of experience (QoE) measurement study on local news website in Africa and found that most of Africa's local content is actually hosted in remote locations.…”

Section: Related Workmentioning

confidence: 99%

State of Internet Measurement in Africa - A Survey

Isah¹,

Phokeer²,

Chavula

et al. 2020

Lecture Notes of the Institute for Computer Sciences, Social Informatics and Telecommunications Engineering

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This paper presents the results of a survey aimed at understanding the status of Internet measurement platforms usage, deployment and capabilities in Africa. It presents findings related to prevalence of measurement in the region, the reasons why the different business categories investigated conduct Internet measurement as well as the metrics of interest to these entities. The survey also looked at the popular measurement platforms that the respondents use in their measurement activities as well as the platforms that are hosted by businesses and users in the African region. The survey also recorded responses related to data handling and privacy considerations. A total of 123 responses were received from 34 countries. The survey revealed that Internet measurements are not widely conducted in the region largely due to the inadequacy of deployed measurement platforms, the lack of awareness in the subject, and the lack of relevant skills to carry out the measurement tasks. We outlined some recommendations to remedy these issues.

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Deep Diving into Africa's Inter-Country Latencies

Cited by 27 publications

References 19 publications

A system for profiling the IXPs in a region and monitoring their growth: Spotlight at the internet frontier

A system for profiling the IXPs in a region and monitoring their growth: Spotlight at the internet frontier

(How Much) Does a Private WAN Improve Cloud Performance?

State of Internet Measurement in Africa - A Survey

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