A Country-specific Analysis on Internet Interconnection Ecosystems

Abstract

With the proliferating number of diverse participants and destinations to reach, the Internet construct has become more intricate to assay. Today, Internet Service Providers (ISPs) establish resilient networks from multiple providers and broaden the number of peering links - as financially as viable. However, the complex structure of the global Internet ecosystem and entwined roles of Internet players simply prevent us from conducting generalized models for grasping interconnections which could be applied globally regardless of the local surroundings. In this paper, the global inter-domain Internet topology is scrutinized by the help of interconnection characteristics within a country-specific stance. Our study on the Internet ecosystems helps us highlight the non-uniformity of interconnections by using both "real world" metrics and network science metrics. One of the significant findings that the analysis yields is that presence of well-established Internet Exchange Points (IXPs) in an interconnection ecosystem - besides the benefit of bolstering the peering fabric - increases the competitive nature of Internet transit market and boosts the inclination to multi-home for stub networks, thus increases the resilience of national Internet constructs.