On the Importance of Internet eXchange Points for Today's Internet Ecosystem

Anja Feldmann

TU Berlin

Friday, July 12, 2013
2:00 PM, ICSI Lecture Hall

Abstract:

Anja Feldmann, "On the Importance of Internet eXchange Points for Today's Internet Ecosystem," available at http://youtu.be/LjR9x5Vc3S4
Watch this talk on YouTube

Internet eXchange Points (IXPs) are generally considered to be the successors of the four Network Access Points that were mandated as part of the decommissioning of the NSFNET in 1994/95 to facilitate the transition to "public Internet" as we know it today. While this popular view does not tell the whole story behind the early beginnings of IXPs, what is true is that since around 1994, the number of operational IXPs worldwide has grown to more than 300 (as of May 2013), with the largest IXPs handling daily traffic volumes comparable to those carried by the largest Tier-1 ISPs.  But IXPs have never really attracted attention from the networking research community. At first glance, this lack of interest seems understandable as IXPs have apparently little to do with current "hot" topic areas such as data centers and cloud services or software defined networking (SDN) and mobile communication.

However, we argue that, in fact, IXPs are not only cool monitoring points with huge visibility but are all about data centers and cloud services and even SDN and mobile communication. To this end, we in this talk start with an overview of the basic technical and operational aspects of IXPs and then highlight some of our initial research results regarding application mix, AS-graph, Internet infrastructure distribution, and traffic flows.

Bio:

Since 2006 Anja Feldmann, PhD, is a full professor at TU Berlin, Germany.  From 2009 to 2013 she was Dean of the Computer Science and Electrical Engineering department of TU Berlin, Germany. From 2000 to 2006 she headed the network architectures group first at Saarland University and then at TU Munich. Before that (1995 to 1999) she was a member of the Networking and Distributed Systems Center at AT&T Labs — Research in Florham Park, New Jersey.  Her current research interests include network architecture, Internet measurement, network performance debugging. She has published more than 60 papers and has served on more than 50 program committees, including as Co-Chair of ACM SIGCOMM 2003 and ACM IMC 2011 and as Co-PC-Chair of ACM SIGCOMM 2007 and ACM IMC 2009.

She is a recipient of the Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz Preis 2011, the highest honor awarded in German research, and the Berliner Wissenschaftspreis 2011. She is a member of the German Academy of Sciences Leopoldina and the supervisory board of SAP AG. She received a MS degree from the University of Paderborn, Germany and a PhD from Carnegie Mellon University.