Insight into Africa's country-level latencies

Josiah Chavula, Amreesh Phokeer, Agustin Formoso, Nick Feamster

Research output: Chapter in Book/Report/Conference proceedingConference contribution

7 Scopus citations

Abstract

This paper provides insight into the effects of cross-border infrastructure and logical interconnections in Africa on both intra-country and cross-border latency on end-to-end Internet paths, by comparing Internet performance measurements between different countries. We collected ICMP pings between countries using Speedchecker and applied a community detection algorithm to group countries based on round trip times (RTTs) between countries. We observed three main latency clusters: East and Southern Africa; North Africa; and West and Central Africa. An interesting observation is that these clusters largely correspond to countries that share the same official languages or past colonial history. The cluster in Eastern and Southern Africa is the most strongly clustered: these countries have the lowest inter-country latency values. We also found that some countries have a much higher intra-country latency than expected, pointing to the lack of local peering or physical infrastructure within the country itself. This finding underscores the importance of physical networking infrastructure deployment and inter-network relationships at a country and regional level.

Original languageEnglish (US)
Title of host publication2017 IEEE AFRICON
Subtitle of host publicationScience, Technology and Innovation for Africa, AFRICON 2017
EditorsDarryn R. Cornish
PublisherInstitute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers Inc.
Pages938-944
Number of pages7
ISBN (Electronic)9781538627754
DOIs
StatePublished - Nov 3 2017
EventIEEE AFRICON 2017 - Cape Town, South Africa
Duration: Sep 18 2017Sep 20 2017

Publication series

Name2017 IEEE AFRICON: Science, Technology and Innovation for Africa, AFRICON 2017

Other

OtherIEEE AFRICON 2017
Country/TerritorySouth Africa
CityCape Town
Period9/18/179/20/17

All Science Journal Classification (ASJC) codes

  • Human-Computer Interaction
  • Signal Processing
  • Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition
  • Artificial Intelligence
  • Computer Networks and Communications
  • Computer Science Applications

Keywords

  • Clustering
  • Internet measurements
  • Latency
  • Peering
  • Topology

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