Blog: Connecting the Dots at the Edges
In the 1980s, there were only a handful of places in the public internet where internet service providers could connect with the public internet to pass data between each other and with their users. These places, known as internet exchange points, were located at the intersections of major fiber optic routes . As shown in the 2021 map above, the number of these locations has grown but remain centralized in areas of high population and fiber density. In addition, carriers have built private peering points to directly deliver traffic to one another. I’ll call internet exchange and private peering points collectively interexchange points (IXP). In a highly centralized cloud computing world, decisions on where to place IXPs were driven by economies of scale, fiber access, and the locations of the large cloud service providers. The time it took for a packet to move from one end of the network to another, i.e., end-to-end latency, was secondary. Because of this, latency-sensitive edge-native applications will not be able to deliver acceptable user experiences on today’s networks.
In early 2020, the Open Edge Computing (OEC) Initiative established a workstream to investigate this IXP placement challenge. Using the Carnegie Mellon University Living Edge Lab and the Interdigital AdvantEDGE Mobile Edge Emulation Platform, we evaluated the impacts of different IXP locations on the performance of the OpenRTiST edge-native application.