A History of an Internet eXchange Point

Abstract

In spite of the tremendous amount of measurement efforts on understanding the Internet as a global system, little is known about the `local' Internet (among ISPs inside a region or a country) due to limitations of the existing measurement tools and scarce data. In this paper, empirical in nature, we characterize the evolution of one such ecosystem of local ISPs by studying the interactions between ISPs happening at the Slovak Internet eXchange (SIX). By crawling the web archive ww.waybackmachine.org we collect 158 snapshots (spanning 14 years) of the SIX website, with the relevant data that allows us to study the dynamics of the Slovak ISPs in terms of: the local ISP peering, the traffic distribution, the port capacity/utilization and the local AS-level traffic matrix. Examining our data revealed a number of invariant and dynamic properties of the studied ecosystem that we report in detail.