TY - GEN
T1 - Out of Sight, Not out of Mind
T2 - 20th ACM Internet Measurement Conference, IMC 2020
AU - Liu, Shucheng
AU - Bischof, Zachary S.
AU - Madan, Ishaan
AU - Chan, Peter K.
AU - Bustamante, Fabián E.
N1 - Funding Information:
We would like to thank our shepherd Alberto Dainotti and the anonymous reviewers for their helpful feedback. This project was in part supported by NSF grant CNS-1619317. Any opinions, findings, and conclusions or recommendations expressed in this material are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect the views of any funding agencies.
Publisher Copyright:
© 2020 ACM.
PY - 2020/10/27
Y1 - 2020/10/27
N2 - Nearly all international data is carried by a mesh of submarine cables connecting virtually every region in the world. It is generally assumed that Internet services rely on this submarine cable network (SCN) for backend traffic, but that most users do not directly depend on it, as popular resources are either local or cached nearby. In this paper, we study the criticality of the SCN from the perspective of end users. We present a general methodology for analyzing the reliance on the SCN for a given region, and apply it to the most popular web resources accessed by users in 63 countries from every inhabited continent, collectively capturing ≈80% of the global Internet population. We find that as many as 64.33% of all web resources accessed from a specific country rely on the SCN. Despite the explosive growth of data center and CDN infrastructure around the world, at least 28.22% of the CDN-hosted resources traverse a submarine cable.
AB - Nearly all international data is carried by a mesh of submarine cables connecting virtually every region in the world. It is generally assumed that Internet services rely on this submarine cable network (SCN) for backend traffic, but that most users do not directly depend on it, as popular resources are either local or cached nearby. In this paper, we study the criticality of the SCN from the perspective of end users. We present a general methodology for analyzing the reliance on the SCN for a given region, and apply it to the most popular web resources accessed by users in 63 countries from every inhabited continent, collectively capturing ≈80% of the global Internet population. We find that as many as 64.33% of all web resources accessed from a specific country rely on the SCN. Despite the explosive growth of data center and CDN infrastructure around the world, at least 28.22% of the CDN-hosted resources traverse a submarine cable.
UR - http://www.scopus.com/inward/record.url?scp=85097277751&partnerID=8YFLogxK
UR - http://www.scopus.com/inward/citedby.url?scp=85097277751&partnerID=8YFLogxK
U2 - 10.1145/3419394.3423633
DO - 10.1145/3419394.3423633
M3 - Conference contribution
AN - SCOPUS:85097277751
T3 - Proceedings of the ACM SIGCOMM Internet Measurement Conference, IMC
SP - 194
EP - 200
BT - IMC 2020 - Proceedings of the 2020 ACM Internet Measurement Conference
PB - Association for Computing Machinery
Y2 - 27 October 2020 through 29 October 2020
ER -