Presentation given by Emile Aben at the 25th EURO-IX Forum, Bucharest, Romania on 26-28 October 2014.

1. EURO-IX | Bucharest | early 21th century
IXP Traffic and
Major Sports Events
emile.aben@ripe.net

2. Euro-IX - October 2014
What did we do?
• RIPE NCC and EURO-IX cooperation
• IXP traffic volume during major (sports) events
• Football World Cup 2010 (South Africa)
• Euro 2012 (Poland/Ukraine)
• Football World Cup 2014 (Brasil)
• Traffic volume variations during matches
• Stats from participating IXPs
2

3. Euro-IX - October 2014
Why do we do it?
• It’s fun :)
• Operational awareness
• Brings IXPs to the attention of whole new audience
!
!
• It’s fun :)
3

4. Euro-IX - October 2014
Pitfalls
• IXP traffic quite often not a representative sample of
Internet traffic for a location (city,country)
- Makes it harder to grok for my dad
- In-network Caches, PNI
!
• Human behaviour
- Event causes human to generate packets or not?
- Event causes shift in where packets go to:
• streaming-video-of-match-traffic up, rest down?
4

5. Euro-IX - October 2014
Common Patterns - “Double Dip” 5
500.0 Gbps
1.0 Tbps
1.5 Tbps
2.0 Tbps
2.5 Tbps
3.0 Tbps
20h
00h
04h
08h
12h
16h
20h
00h
04h
tracvolume
time (UTC)
Tra c volume at amsix-nl on 2014-06-13.Fri
CHI
AUS
ESP
NED
MEX
CMR
2014-05-09
2014-05-16
2014-05-23
2014-05-30
2014-06-06
2014-06-13
256 TB “missing”
• “Double dip” even on larger IXPs (AMS-IX, DE-CIX,
LINX,etc.)

6. Euro-IX - October 2014
Common Patterns - “Twin Peaks” 6
0.0 bps
5.0 Gbps
10.0 Gbps
15.0 Gbps
20.0 Gbps
25.0 Gbps
30.0 Gbps
35.0 Gbps
20h
00h
04h
08h
12h
16h
20h
00h
04h
tracvolume
time (UTC)
Tra c volume at nskix-ru on 2014-06-17.Tue
GHA
USA
BRA
MEX
BEL
ALG
RUS
KOR
2014-05-13
2014-05-20
2014-05-27
2014-06-03
2014-06-10
2014-06-17

7. Euro-IX - October 2014
Catching the Mood
• Dramatic game, 7 DE goals, correlating to uptick in
traffic in BR
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200.0 Gbps
250.0 Gbps
300.0 Gbps
350.0 Gbps
400.0 Gbps
450.0 Gbps
500.0 Gbps
18h
19h
20h
21h
22h
23h
00h
tracvolume
time (UTC)
Tra c volume at Sao Paolo IXP during Brazil-Germany
compared to Cameroon-Brazil and non-game day
1st half 2nd half
8 July (BRA-GER)
23 June (BRA-CMR)
27 June (no games)

8. Euro-IX - October 2014
Many more interesting features
!
• Full report at:
https://labs.ripe.net/Members/emileaben/internet-traffic-during-the-
world-cup-2014
!
• Featuring
- Overtime
- Non IXP data sources
- First RIPE Labs article with picture of a cat
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9. Euro-IX - October 2014
High Granularity Data Source
• https://blog.twitter.com/2014/penalty-kicks-as-
seen-through-twitter-data
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10. Euro-IX - October 2014
Future?
• Great coop between Euro-IX IXPs and RIPE NCC
- Euro-IX asked for IXP volunteers to provide data
• Many thanks for that!
- Popular content on RIPE Labs
• Keep on going:
- More of the same?
- More direct IXP involvement?
- Finer granularity, 1 minute, 30 second?
• Better correlation to exact event, and structure of
event.
• Other ideas?
10