Assessing the peering evolution in the AFRINIC region

The poor quality of Internet access appears as an obstacle in many African countries for their development. Many organizations aim at assisting African ISP providers and universities to solve this problem. So far, few previous studies have targeted the African continent. The purpose of this project is to complement those studies by learning from historical routing data the peering habits among local ISPs. By considering this routing data covering the last decade we compute diverse statistics and analyze the growth of involved African Internet Exchange Platforms. Our results show that almost all the prefixes appear since their allocation date and most of them have appeared on 2015 as the year last of appearance. Moreover, the most frequent prefixes come from South Africa, Nigeria and Egypt. Also, the IXPs mostly used for peering (JINX and CINX according to our dataset) have more reallocated prefixes than the rest of the IXPs. In addition, the newest IXPs are TunIXP, SIxP, and DINX. Hence, they are still growing, whereas the IXPs who have been peering the earliest (JINX and KIXP) show a drop in the evolution. Such findings are essential for taking suitable decisions aiming at empowering the Internet underlying structure knowledge in the region. They can easily help ISPs to choose at which IXP to peer next, or be used by the stakeholders to evaluate the growth of their IXP in comparison with others. Moreover, one can determine as regional IXPs those at which we discovered most prefixes and origin ASes connected to and boost them.Ingeniería en Tecnologías de Telecomunicació