Studying the effect of internet eXchange points on internet link delays

Internet exchange points (IXPs) are an increasingly important constituent of the Internet at the Autonomous System (AS) level. IXPs are set up with the goal of enabling greater efficiency in traffic exchange between ASes both from economical and technical perspectives. Little is however known about the effect that IXPs have in packet transmission between peering ASes, with a significant focus of the research community being in determining their effect on the topology evolution of the Internet. In this paper, we report on the increasing deployment of IXPs around the world over the past few years and carry out a set of experiments to try and establish the effectiveness of Internet routes traversing an IXP. We find that IXP links entail lesser delays than normal links on the Internet even though their presence does not decrease the length of a path. Our results present pointers towards developing more extensive experiments to verify the effectiveness of deploying IXPs worldwide.