Deferred peerings as obstacles on the Internet

Abstract

Net neutrality is a much discussed topic in both mainstream media and research papers alike. Yet the related topic of peering has mostly eluded these discussions. Like net neutrality, it affects how fast content gets delivered to users - it just works in a different manner. We point out the differences, examine the current state of the art and propose a system to analyze peering on a global scale. The system makes use of RIPE Atlas - a network of more than 9,000 measurement probes scattered around the globe. By using a microservice architecture we can scale our system elastically and easily respond to the vast amount of data generated. In addition we give a prototypical implementation and use it to analyze the peerings in three different countries. The results of our evaluation show just how big the impact of peering is.