Over the past two decades, a desire to reduce transit cost, improve control over routing and performance, and enhance the quality of experience for users, has yielded a more densely connected, flat network with fewer hops between sources and destinations. The shortening of paths in terms of the number of hops or links has also meant, for what is at the end an infrastructure-bound network, the lengthening of many of these links. In this paper, we focus on an important aspect of the evolving logical connectivity of the Internet that has received little attention to date: intercontinental long-haul links. We develop a methodology and associated processing system for identifying long haul links in traceroute measurements. We apply this system to a large corpus of traceroute data and report on multiple aspects of long haul connectivity including country-level prevalence, routers as international gateways, preferred long-haul destinations, and the evolution of these characteristics over a 7 year period. We identify over 9K layer 3 links that satisfy our definition for intercontinental long haul with many of them terminating in a relatively small number of nodes. An analysis of connected components shows a clearly dominant one with a relative size that remains stable despite a significant growth of the long-haul infrastructure.
翻译:过去二十年来,人们希望降低过境成本,改进对路由和性能的控制,提高用户经验的质量,希望降低过境成本,希望改善路由和性能,从而形成一个更密集、更平的网络,减少来源和目的地之间的跳跃和连接,缩短跳跃或连接的路径,这也意味着,对于一个以基础设施为主的网络来说,许多这些链接的延长。在本文件中,我们侧重于互联网不断演变的逻辑连接的一个重要方面,迄今为止,这种逻辑连接很少受到注意:洲际长河连接。我们开发了一种方法和相关处理系统,用以识别跟踪路径测量的长途连接。我们将该系统应用于大量跟踪路径数据,并报告长途连接的多个方面,包括国家一级的普遍程度、路由器作为国际网关、偏好长的长途目的地以及这些特征在7年期间的演变。我们确定了超过9K层3的连接,满足了我们大陆际长途连接的定义,其中许多连接以相对较少的节点结束。对连接的部件的分析表明,一个明显具有支配地位的部件,其相对规模尽管有相当大的增长,但仍然稳定。</s>