The paper entitled "Seven years in the life of Hypergiants' off-nets", co-authored by researchers from the Institute of Computer Science of FORTH Lefteris Manassakis, George Nomikos, Vasileios Kotronis and Xenofontas Dimitropoulos, won the Best Paper Award at the ACM SIGCOMM 2021 conference, which was held online on August 23-27, 2021. The work was a collaboration between researchers from University College London, Microsoft (Azure), Columbia University, Lancaster University, University of Crete and TU Delft. The SIGCOMM Annual Conference is the flagship conference of the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) on computer and data communication networks. The award is granted for the first time to researchers of a Greek institution.
The paper studies the expansion of content "Hypergiants" (Google, Netflix, Facebook, Akamai, etc.) in networks that serve end users, such as Internet Service Providers. Content Hypergiants deliver the vast majority of Internet traffic to end users. In recent years, some hypergiants have invested heavily in deploying services and servers inside end user networks. With several dozen Hypergiants and thousands of servers deployed inside networks, these off-net (meaning outside the Hypergiant networks) deployments change the structure of the Internet. Previous efforts to study them have relied on proprietary data or specialized per-Hypergiant measurement techniques that neither scale nor generalize, providing a limited view of content delivery on today's Internet.
Growth of the number of networks that host Hypergiants' servers over the last seven years. The size of the networks is annotated with a different color.
This work proposes a generic and easy to implement methodology to measure the expansion of Hypergiants' off-nets The paper’s results show that the number of networks hosting Hypergiant off-nets has tripled from 2013 to 2021, reaching 4.5k networks. The largest Hypergiants dominate these deployments, with almost all of these networks hosting an off-net for at least one -- and increasingly two or more -- of Google, Netflix, Facebook, or Akamai. These four Hypergiants have off-nets within networks that provide access to a significant fraction of the end user population.
The paper is available (open access) via this [link]. he paper’s portal, source code and data are available via this [link].
