An insight into Africa’s country-level latencies

Chavula, Josiah and Phokeer, Amreesh and Formoso, Agustin and Feamster, Nick (2017) An insight into Africa’s country-level latencies, Proceedings of IEEE AFRICON 2017, 18-20 September 2017, Cape Town, IEEE.

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Abstract

This paper gives some insight into the impact of cross-border infrastructure and logical interconnections in Africa by comparing Internet performance measurements between different countries. We built a dataset of ICMP pings between countries using a software probe platform and applied a community detection algorithm to group countries based on round trip times (RTTs) between themselves. We observed three main latency clusters as being East and Southern Africa, North Africa, and West and part of Central Africa. An interesting observation is that these clusters largely correspond to countries sharing the same official languages or past colonial history. Of the three clusters, Eastern and Southern Africa appear to be the most strongly clustered, as they have the lowest inter-country latency values as compared to the rest of the other two clusters. 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 highlights the importance of physical networking infrastructure deployment and inter-network relationships at a regional level.

Item Type:	Conference paper
Uncontrolled Keywords:	Internet measurements, Louvain algorithm, latency, performance
Subjects:	Computer systems organization > Architectures > Distributed architectures
Date Deposited:	11 Oct 2017
Last Modified:	10 Oct 2019 15:31
URI:	http://pubs.cs.uct.ac.za/id/eprint/1179

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