Internet Performance Analysis of South Asian Countries Using End-To-End Internet Performance Measurements
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SLAC-PUB-17205 Internet Performance Analysis of South Asian Countries using End-to-End Internet Performance Measurements Saqib Aliy and Guojun Wang∗ Roger Leslie Cottrell Sara Masood School of Computer Science and Stanford Linear Accelerator Center University of Agriculture Educational Software, Guangzhou University, P.O. Box 4349, Faisalabad, Pakistan, 38000 Guangzhou, P. R. China, 510006 Palo Alto, California 94309-4349 Email: [email protected] Emails: {saqibali,csgjwang}@gzhu.edu.cn Email: [email protected] Abstract—Internet performance is highly correlated with key number of Internet users and the development of numerous economic development metrics of a region. According to World Internet applications for businesses, education, entertain- Bank, the economic growth of a country increases 1.3% with ment, news, gaming and social networking. Consequently, a 10% increase in the speed of the Internet. Therefore, it is Internet traffic is increasing tremendously day by day. More- necessary to monitor and understand the performance of the over, all these applications require a rigorous amount of end- Internet links in the region. It helps to figure out the infras- to-end link performance in terms of scalability, reliability, tructural inefficiencies, poor resource allocation, and routing and performance. A delay of few hundred milliseconds can issues in the region. Moreover, it provides healthy suggestions cost millions of dollars to the businesses. For example, the for future upgrades. Therefore, the objective of this paper is to study by Singla et. al. [1] shows that: a 100 ms delay understand the Internet performance and routing infrastruc- causes Amazon a loss of 1% of sales; a 400 ms delay in ture of South Asian countries in comparison to the developed search responses decreases the search volume of Google world and neighboring countries using end-to-end Internet per- by 0.74%; and a 500 ms of delay in Internet performance formance measurements. The South Asian countries comprise reduces the revenue of Bing by 1.2% per user. Similarly, nearly 32% of the Internet users in Asia and nearly 16% of the study shows that most of the consumers abandon the the world. The Internet performance metrics in the region are web site if they have to wait for more than 3 seconds to collected through the PingER framework. The framework is load a page. As a result, the user experience is impaired and revenue is reduced for the service providers. developed by the SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory, USA and is running for the last 20 years. PingER has 16 monitoring The Internet performance is also directly tied to key nodes in the region, and in the last year PingER monitors about economic development metrics of the countries. According 40 sites in South Asia using the ubiquitous ping facility. The to the World Bank, the economic growth of a country collected data is used to estimate the key Internet performance increases 1.3% with a 10% increase in the speed of the metrics of South Asian countries. The performance metrics are Internet [2]. In terms of Internet performance, the countries compared with the neighboring countries and the developed in regions such as South Asia, Central Asia, and Latin America are 5-9 years behind countries in the regions such world. Particularly, the TCP throughput of the countries is as North America, Europe, and East Asia. African countries also correlated with different development indices. Further, are nearly 15 years behind Europe in terms of Internet speed. worldwide Internet connectivity and routing patterns of the Similarly, only 28.3% of the African people have the Internet countries are investigated to figure out the inconsistencies in access as compared to 76.7% of Europeans and 89% of the region. The performance analysis revealed that the South North Americans [3], [4], [5]. The same relationship holds Asia region is 7-10 years behind the developed regions of North when we correlate these countries in terms of their economic America (USA and Canada), Europe, and East Asia. development. Thus, Internet performance participates effec- Index Terms—Internet performance monitoring, PingER, tively in the economic development of the countries and the packet loss, ping, round trip time regions. South Asia is one of the highly populated and fast- 1. Introduction growing regions of the developing world. According to the UN1, it has a population of 1.749 billion that is one-fourth of The Internet is rapidly transforming social, cultural, the world’s population. It includes Afghanistan (34 million), economic and political aspects of life. This increases the Bangladesh (164 million), Bhutan (0.79 million), India (1.3 billion), Maldives (0.37 million), Nepal (29 million), Pak- yDepartment of Computer Science, University of Agriculture, Faisalabad, Pakistan, 38000. Email: [email protected] ∗Correspondence to: [email protected] 1. http://www.un.org/ This material is based upon work supported by the U.S. Department of Energy, Office of Science, under Contract No. DE-AC02-76SF00515. TABLE 1: Internet user statistics in South Asia dated March 31, 2017 Internet Users Internet Users Penetration rate Percent Growth rate Asia Population in year 2000 in March 2017 (% Population) (2000-2017) Afghanistan 34,169,169 1,000 4,005,414 11.7 298.5 Bangladesh 164,827,718 100,000 66,965,000 40.6 195.78 Bhutan 792,877 500 295,177 37.2 189.64 India 1,342,512,706 5,000,000 462,124,989 34.4 112.63 Maldives 375,867 6,000 270,000 71.8 88.6 Nepal 29,187,037 50,000 6,400,000 21.9 124.49 Pakistan 196,744,376 133,900 35,835,400 18.2 153.86 Sri Lanka 20,905,335 121,500 6,614,164 31.6 94.68 istan (196 million), and Sri Lanka (21 million)2. Among Asia region is presented in Section 7, and finally, Section 8 them, India is the largest and fastest growing economy and concludes the paper. includes a population of over 1.3 billion people. However, only 34% of the population is connected to the Internet. On 2. Related work the other hand, China with a population of 1.38 billion, 52% of the population are using the Internet. Similarly, The active Internet performance monitoring of a region Afghanistan has the lowest number of the Internet users in is essential to understanding the current performance of the region i.e., 11.7% of the population. It is an interesting the links. It helps to figure out the infrastructural ineffi- fact that in the year 2000, there were only 1000 Internet ciencies, poor resource allocation, and routing issues in the users in Afghanistan. This grew to 4 Million in March 2017 region [6]. A number of Internet performance monitoring with a growth rate of about 300%. The Internet user statistics frameworks are available e.g., SamKnows6, BISmark [7], of the South Asian countries are summarized in Table 13. Dasu [8], Netradar [9], Portolan [10], RIPE Atlas [11], and The objective of this paper is to understand the Internet perfSONAR [12] originally partially based on the PingER performance and routing infrastructure of South Asian coun- framework [13]. In-depth reviews of these Internet perfor- tries in comparison to the developed world and neighboring mance frameworks based on their deployment methodology, countries using end-to-end Internet performance measure- probing technique, features, and research impacts are avail- ments. The data for the analysis and comparison is collected able in the literature [14], [15], [16], [17]. Mostly, these through the PingER framework. This is a well-known Inter- platforms use ping, mtr, cron, ntp, dig, netstat, net performance monitoring framework developed by the iperf, and traceroute commands to monitor the In- SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory4, USA and is run- ternet performance of the links in terms of loss, round trip ning for the last 20 years. The framework uses the ubiquitous time, throughput, routing etc. The data collected by these ping facility to capture the performance of the Internet platforms is used to analyze the end-to-end performance of links. The detailed discussion on the PingER framework and the links, quantifying the digital divide among the regions, methodology is available in Sections 2 & 3. The captured detecting congested routes, identifying last mile problems ping statistics are used to calculate key Internet performance and evaluating the impact of major events i.e., cable cuts, metrics for the Internet links of South Asian countries. These tsunamis, earthquakes, and social upheavals. performance metrics reveal interesting information when PingER (Ping End-to-end Reporting)7 is an Internet End- compared with the developed world and among neighboring to-end Performance Measurement (IEPM)8 framework led countries. Further, in this paper, the derived TCP throughput by the SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory. It is active of the countries in the South Asia region is compared with since 1998 and contains a multi-domain historical dataset the development indices available from the UN and the from 700 nodes in 170 countries of the world. It covers International Telecommunications Union (ITU)5. The com- an area containing 98% of the Internet population of the parison will help to determine the strength of the correlation world [2]. Basically, it was designed to monitor the end- between the Internet Performance metrics and development to-end performance of the Internet links for modern High indices in the South Asia region. Energy Nuclear and Particle (HENP) physics experiments The remaining paper is organized as follows. Related taking place among SLAC, the Brookhaven National Labo- work is discussed in Section 2. Section 3 provides the ratory (BNL)9 and the European Center for Particle Physics performance monitoring methodology. PingER coverage in (CERN)10 [13].