A new intrinsic way to measure IXP performance: an experience in Bolivia

Bolivia, a landlocked emerging country in South America, has one of the smallest networks in the whole Internet. Before the IXP implementation, delivering packets between national ISPs had to be sent them through international transit links. Being aware of this situation and looking for increasing the number of users, Bolivian government enacted a law to gather all national ISPs on a single IXP in 2013. In spite of several articles have researched about this topic, no one before has set the focus on measuring the evolution of end-users parameters in a South American developing country, moreover after a significant changing on the topology. For the current work, we have mainly studied hop, latency, traffic and route variation, a long a seven months. Topology have not been studied because Bolivian ISPs must be connected each others under legal obligation. To achieve our measurement goals, and under absence of global-scale measuring projects in this country, we have developed our own active-measurement platform among local ASes. During the platform development we had to deal with local ISP fears, governmental agencies and regulation pressures. We also survey the main previous papers on IXP analysis, and we classfied them on obtained data and their sources.