Fastest routes (Internship@AFRINIC)

Network operators, content providers and content delivery networks (CDNs) at times need to know the latency between major hubs before making the decision on where to place a PoP, a cache or a server. Not only they need to know the route, but they also want to know which network in a country or city would provide the fastest connectivity to the other endpoint. 

The first goal of the project is to serve a quick way for network operators, content providers or CDNs to find the fastest network from a location to any other measurable endpoint in Africa. The interactive should tell you the time difference between different competing networks operating from the same origin.

The second goal is to find the best and worst-performing networks and routes. We need to understand where the delays are coming from, i.e. whether the traffic is actually going through IXPs or international links (trombone). In particular, we are concerned with which networks are fastest relative to the geodesic distance (i.e. taking into consideration the speed of light in fibre). We should also highlight routes that are traversing IXPs either in-country or in a region.

This project involves running ping and traceroute measurements in between cities, collect, curate the data, storing in a machine-readable format and visualizing on a custom made platform.

Keywords: Internet measurements, traceroute, latency, ping, visualization, javascript