Growth of Exchange Points by Number of Participants

1
Growth of Exchange Points by Number of
Participants

• Version 1.0
• December, 2001
• Bill Woodcock
• Packet Clearing House

2
Research Spinoff from Peering-Coordinator Toolset

• Principal goal of the toolset is to assist
  peering coordinators with routine tasks while
  simultaneously
• gradually scrubbing the EP in-addr zones and
  RADB aut-nums and
• building a more complete, but anonymizable,
  database of peerings than can be published in
  aut-nums.

3
Dataset

• Monitoring several sources, notably in-addr zone
  updates and reachability.
• Updating the database once a day.
• email and since-last-login add/delete/change
  notification.
• Zone files contained non-uniform data (dates in
  more than fifty formats, for example)
• Pushing scrubbed zone files back to ISI.
• Input to WorldCom for PeerMaker.

4
Popular Wisdom
1 - Initial burst of founding members 2 - slow
linear growth to critical mass 3 - exponential
growth to capacity
3
2
1
5
Graph of Historical Data

• Following slide shows growth by number of peers
  for the eleven exchange points which currently
  have more than 25 peers and are utilizing the
  exchange point address space...

6
MAE-West
ME ATM
PAIX
MW ATM
Pac Bell
New York
Seattle
Dallas
Brisbane
AADS
Perth
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No Exponential Growth Here

• With a few interesting exceptions, growth fits
  pretty well to straight lines.
• Clusters at 5/year and 12/year.

8
MAE-West
ME ATM
PAIX
MW ATM
Pac Bell
New York
Seattle
Dallas
Brisbane
AADS
Perth
9
Exceptions

• WorldComs announcement of their intention to
  deprecate MAE-West and the opening of
  MAE-West-ATM show clear interaction, and a
  beneficial effect on the PAIXs growth rate as
  well

10
MAE-West
PAIX
MW ATM
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Requests from the Research Community?

• Currently supported queries
• Total peers by month at exchanges which are above
  ltthresholdgt from ltdategt to present
• Total exchanges by month for all ISPs which are
  above ltthresholdgt from ltdategt to present
• Contemplating support for
• Specific peer/date adds for selected exchange
• Specific exchange/date adds for selected ISP (?)
• Currently returning results as HTML table or CSV,
  should soon have graphs as well.

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• Bill Woodcock
• woody_at_pch.net
• www.pch.net/documents/papers/exchange-point-growth
  
• www.pch.net/peermaster