A measurement study determining the effect of Internet eXchange points on popular webservers

Internet exchange points (IXPs) are an upcoming and essential component of the Internet infrastructure exhibiting numerous effects on various aspects of Internet topology and packet routing. While IXPs have been shown to play a major role in the evolution of the Internet topology, there has been little prior work in determining their effect on packet routing across the Internet. This paper presents a step forward in this regard by presenting initial measurements and results obtained from studying how IXPs affect routes to the most popular websites across the world. The main focus of our measurements are in determining the bandwidth availability of links along a route traversing an IXP and the corresponding effect on end-to-end latencies. We observe the presence of occasional bandwidth bottlenecks located at the IXP routers/switches along a path resulting in higher queuing delays which in-turn lead to a greater probability of congestion losses occurring downstream from the IXP. However, end-to-end latencies on IXP paths are lesser than non-IXP paths suggesting that gains made by bypassing the Internet backbone altogether through the establishment of peering relationships at the exchange points does in-fact lead to more efficient packet routing across the Internet.