A Comparative Look into Public IXP Datasets Rowan Kloti¨ Bernhard Ager Vasileios Kotronis George Nomikos Xenofontas Dimitropoulos ETH Zurich, Switzerland FORTH, Greece frkloeti,bager,
[email protected] fgnomikos,
[email protected] ABSTRACT the global IXP ecosystem, namely the European Internet Exchange Internet eXchange Points (IXPs) are core components of the Inter- Association (Euro-IX) [3] and Packet Clearing House (PCH) [6]. net infrastructure where Internet Service Providers (ISPs) meet and These datasets are contributed and kept up-to-date by different stake- exchange traffic. During the last few years, the number and size of holders, e.g., by the publisher, or through self-reporting by the IXPs IXPs have increased rapidly, driving the flattening and shortening and their participants. of Internet paths. However, understanding the present status of the In this work, we do the first cross-comparison of the IXP data IXP ecosystem and its potential role in shaping the future Internet provided by PeeringDB, Euro-IX, and PCH. We compare in depth requires rigorous data about IXPs, their presence, status, partici- several attributes, like IXPs’ locations, facilities and participant pants, etc. In this work, we do the first cross-comparison of three information. We highlight the similarity of the available data, com- well-known publicly available IXP databases, namely of PeeringDB, plementary information, and data discrepancies. We analyze in total Euro-IX, and PCH. A key challenge we address is linking IXP iden- data from about 499, 490, and 687 IXPs in PeeringDB, Euro-IX, tifiers across databases maintained by different organizations. We and PCH, respectively.