Prof. Dr. Anja Feldmann

"On the importance of Internet eXchange Points for today's Internet ecosystem"

(Vortrag im Rahmen der "MPI Distinguished Lecture Series" in Kooperation mit dem Fachbereich Informatik)

Internet eXchange Points (IXPs) are generally considered to be the successors of the four Network Access Points that were mandated as part of the decommissioning of the NSFNET in 1994/95 to facilitate the transition to "public Internet" as we know it today. While this does not tell the whole story of the early beginnings, what is true is that since around 1994, the number of IXPs has grown to more than 300 with the largest IXPs handling traffic volumes comparable to those of Tier-1 ISPs. But IXPs have never attracted much attention from the research community. At first glance, this lack of interest seems understandable as IXPs have apparently little to do with current "hot" topic areas such as data centers and cloud services or software defined networking (SDN) and mobile communication.

However, we argue that, in fact, IXPs are not only cool monitoring points with huge visibility but are all about Internet connectivity data centers and cloud services and even SDN and mobile communication. To this end, we in this talk start with an overview of the basic technical and operational aspects of IXPs and then highlight some of our research results regarding application mix, AS-graph, Internet infrastructure distribution, and traffic flows.