A view of latency clusters in Africa

1. Looking for Latency
Clusters in Africa’s
Internet
AfPIF 2017
Agustín Formoso
LACNIC
Amreesh Phokeer
AFRINIC
Josiah Chavula
AFRINIC
Gareth Tyson
Queen Mary University
London
Arjuna Sathiaseelan
University of Cambridge
1

2. What We Know
Circuitous routes and high end-to-end latencies across the continent 2

3. Research Questions
Which countries are better
inter-connected, which ones
are not?
– Key clusters of
connectivity in the
region
– How are inter-country
latencies impacted by
topology and
interconnection
strategies?
3
AXIS Project

4. Measurement Platform
Two platforms for launching measurements
● 229 RIPE Atlas probes in Africa
○ 36 African countries
○ Hardware-based
● However:
○ mostly in university networks
and ISPs?
○ about 50% of Atlas probes in
Africa are in ZA
● 850 probes in Africa
○ 52 African countries
○ Software-based (Windows
PCs)
○ Include edge networks /
home users
● However:
– No IPv6
– Unreliability (based on
hosts’ availability)
4

5. ● Speedchecker Probes
(www.speedchecker.xyz )
– 850 software
probes
– 319 ASes
– 52 countries
● 50% of the countries
had at least 20% of
their ASes probed.
5
Vantage points

6. Speedtest.net Targets
6
42
African
countries
213
SpeedTest
servers
42
African
countries

7. Data Collection
• Pingfrom each probe:
– select random African Speedtest server as target
– launch 10 consecutive pings (one second apart) to their randomly
chosen Speedtest server
– return the minimum delay (RTT) observed at that time period
• Traceroutefrom each probe:
– launch a Traceroute to randomly selected Speedtest server
– for each router hop
• determine the ASN using the RIPE Routing Information Service
• attach the geolocation using MaxMind GeoLite2-City
7

8. Data Collection
8
4 times a
day
Pings and
traceroute
3
months
42 200
RTT
samples
31 500
traces
captured
319
ASNs

9. Country-level Latencies
9
Africa
~78ms
North
America
~45ms
Europe
~30ms
LAC
~76ms
Mean in-country

10. Country-level Latencies
10
Under 30ms
● Mauritius
● Reunion
● Cote D’Ivoire
CI->CI
<30ms
Mean in-country
Under 40ms
● South Africa
● Egypt
● Benin
CD->CD
~300ms

11. LOOKING FOR CLUSTERS
11

12. ● Northern
● Southern
● Eastern
● Western
12
Africa Latency Clusters

13. ● Northern
● Southern
● Eastern
● Western
13
Africa Latency Clusters
EXPECTED

14. Unusual Cases in Latency Clusters
● Senegal, Liberia
and Benin on the
West coast, in
Northern cluster
● Madagascar,
Seychelles, islands
of the Indian
Ocean, clustered
alongside countries
in the North
● Somalia, on the
East coast, is
clustered with
countries on the
West coast.
14

15. Unusual Cases in Latency Clusters
● Senegal, Liberia
and Benin on the
West coast, in
Northern cluster
● Madagascar,
Seychelles, islands
of the Indian
Ocean, clustered
alongside countries
in the North
● Somalia, on the
East coast, is
clustered with
countries on the
West coast.
15

16. Unusual Cases in Latency Clusters
● Senegal, Liberia
and Benin on the
West coast, in
Northern cluster
● Madagascar,
Seychelles, islands
of the Indian
Ocean, clustered
alongside countries
in the North
● Somalia, on the
East coast, is
clustered with
countries on the
West coast.
16

17. Angola & Ethiopia unclustered
Ethiopia Upstream
100% Overseas
Angola Upstream
50% Overseas*
*16% Southern ->
Europe
17
EU
354ms
144ms
N.America

18. Inter-cluster Latencies
inter-cluster median RTTs
Southern and Eastern
○ Lowest inter-cluster
delay ~ 92ms
○ Lowest intra-cluster
RTTs individually
18
Inter-cluster delays are
mostly exceeding 200ms
Western cluster
has the highest
intra-cluster
RTTs

19. EXPLORING THE UPSTREAM
19

20. Africa’s upstream providers
● 37.8% of traceroute paths first hop outside of Africa
● 6.6% through SA and 4.5% through Mauritius (WIOCC)
20

21. Africa’s Top 10 upstream
providers
21

22. Africa’s Top 10 upstream
providers
22
France Telecom (Orange) accounts for 17% for French speaking countries in
West Africa

23. Utilisation of upstream providers
by cluster
23
50%
have
overseas
hops
(Europe)
14%
with 4+
hops before
Africa

24. Latency to Upstream providers
1. Same cluster 203ms
2. Other African Cluster 243ms
3. Overseas 268ms
Northern North
America: 71ms
Southern North
America: 227ms
24CDF of RTTs grouped by location of upstream providers
RTT to the first AS hop

25. Take-aways
25
Below 40ms
Benin
Egypt
Mauritius
Ivory Coast
Reunion
South Africa
Cluster w/
high
delays
(Western)
Due to higher
usage of
international
transit
providers
Africa’s Interdomain
communications highly reliant
on inter-continental transit

26. Future work
• Correlation with Physical
infrastructure, IXP presence in
African countries and Peering
relationships
• Investigating delays between
countries and popular web/content
infrastructure
• Linking the findings to regional
Internet development strategies
(e.g., deployment of regional IXPs)
26

27. THANK YOU!
Questions?
27
Chavula J., Phokeer A., and Formoso A. "Looking for latency
clusters in Africa’s Internet." AFRICON, 2017. 13th Edition of
IEEE AFRICON Conference in Africa. Cape Town, 18-20
September 2017.
Preview:
http://www.eecs.qmul.ac.uk/~tysong/files/africa-internet.pdf

28. Upcoming Internet Measurements
Workshops
Internet
Measurement/RIPE Atlas
Workshop
NOV 27 - DEC 02, 2017
LAGOS, NIGERIA
International Workshop on Internet
Measurements Research in Africa
DEC 11– 12, 2017
LAGOS, NIGERIA
!!CALL FOR PAPERS UNTIL 17 SEPT 2017!!
28

29. • Central location (IXP,
main ISP)
• 10 Mbps dedicated
• IPv4 (unfiltered)
• IPv6 highly
recommended
(dual-stack)
29
Host an anchor
!! Sponsored by AFRINIC !!
atlas@afrinic.net

30. References
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communities in large networks. Journal of Statistical Mechanics: Theory and Experiment,
10 (2008).
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Routes on the Latency of Intra-Africa Internet Traffic: A Study of Research and Education
Networks. 2015, pp. 64–73.
3. Fanou, R., Tyson, G., Francois, P., and Sathiaseelan, A. Pushing the frontier: Exploring the
african web ecosystem. In World Wide Web Conference (WWW) (2016).
4. Formoso, A., and Casas, P. Looking for network latency clusters in the lac region. In
Workshop on Fostering Latin American Research in Data Communication Networks (2016).
5. Fanou, R., Francois, P., and Aben, E. On the Diversity of Interdomain Routing in Africa.
2015, pp. 41–54.
6. Gilmore, J., Huysamen, N., and Krzesinski, A. Mapping the african internet. In Proceedings
Southern African Telecommunication Networks and Applications Conference (SATNAC),
Mauritius (2007).
7. Gupta, A., Calder, M., Feamster, N., Chetty, M., Calandro, E., and Katz-Bassett, E. Peering at
the internet’s frontier: A first look at isp interconnectivity in Africa. Passive Active
Measurement Conference (PAM) (2014), 204–213.
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