Investigation of Dependencies between IXPs

The intuitive understanding of the traffic dependencies of major IXPs is that if one IXP goes down the traffic volumes carried by this IXP moves to the other ones. …

The intuitive understanding of the traffic dependencies of major IXPs is that if one IXP goes down the traffic volumes carried by this IXP moves to the other ones. A major incident of one of the most respected and largest IXPs in May 2015 shows that if one of the major IXP goes down the traffic volumes at other major IXPs can be also negatively impacted. We at DE-CIX investigated this phenomenon and found asymmetric routing paths, overloaded remote peering routers and user behaviour to be possible causes. To investigate asymmetric routing paths we developed a toolset called jAtlasX. jAtlasX utilizes RIPE Atlas probes for traceroute measurements between two ASes and identifies IXPs traversed and asymmetric routing paths. This presentation contains findings coming from this incident and gives insights into the measurements DE-CIX was conducting facilitating the jAtlasX toolset and RIPE Atlas probe platform.