African Route Collectors Data Analyzer: a compass to support peering growth in the region

Abstract

As of today, there are 37 IXPs in Africa hosted in 28 countries. However, less than 50% of them provide publicly accessible data on current traffic statistics and IXP colocation data. Further, only 2 IXPs host RouteViews collectors. Beyond this, locally useful data that can inform and support the growth of peering in the region is also unavailable. To correct this lack, we designed an open web application entitled ARDA (African Route-Collectors Data Analyzer) aiming at analyzing African Route-Collectors Data. Deployed at JINX, it indeed collected BGP routes over the period 2005 up to now from all PCH and RouteViews route-collectors located in the region. We analyzed this data from various angles, highlighting the evolution of visible prefixes and ASNs, the evolution of IPv4/IPv6 prefixes, the evolution of the percentage of long prefix length announcements, ASNs or prefixes by country/region assignment, etc. The application displays those statistics under different views, depending on the IXP, the set of IXPs in the region and later in each country. We aim to make this platform available to the community, discuss our results, and receive its feedbacks from stakeholders and IXP operators before its release.