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Cairo Regional Internet Exchange

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The Cairo Regional Internet Exchange ( CRIX ) is an Internet Exchange Point which was formed in Cairo , Egypt by a joint venture between the National Telecom Company (NTC) and its subsidiary ECC Solutions along with the Indian FLAG Telecom. The exchange was officially inaugurated in Cairo on December 18, 2002 by the then Minister of Communications & Information Technology , later Prime Minister Ahmed Nazif .

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63-586: CRIX is the central peering point for local and regional Internet Service Providers (ISPs) in Egypt and the Middle East . Its purpose is to efficiently route all intra-Regional Internet traffic among the operators without having to pass through the United States or Europe . This allows the regional data carriers to significantly optimize upstream capacity costs, enhance their existing bandwidth capacities and reduce

126-451: A price signaled by the network. Each link capacity imposes a constraint, which gives rise to a Lagrange multiplier , p l {\displaystyle p_{l}} . The sum of these multipliers, y i = ∑ l p l r l i , {\displaystyle y_{i}=\sum _{l}p_{l}r_{li},} is the price to which the flow responds. Congestion control then becomes

189-425: A denial-of-service attack. Congestive collapse (or congestion collapse) is the condition in which congestion prevents or limits useful communication. Congestion collapse generally occurs at choke points in the network, where incoming traffic exceeds outgoing bandwidth. Connection points between a local area network and a wide area network are common choke points. When a network is in this condition, it settles into

252-526: A direct crossconnect can be provisioned between participants within the same building, usually for a much lower cost than telco circuits. Most of the traffic on the Internet, especially traffic between the largest networks, occurs via private peering. However, because of the resources required to provision each private peer, many networks are unwilling to provide private peering to "small" networks, or to "new" networks which have not yet proven that they will provide

315-478: A distributed optimization algorithm. Many current congestion control algorithms can be modeled in this framework, with p l {\displaystyle p_{l}} being either the loss probability or the queueing delay at link l {\displaystyle l} . A major weakness is that it assigns the same price to all flows, while sliding window flow control causes burstiness that causes different flows to observe different loss or delay at

378-470: A given link. Among the ways to classify congestion control algorithms are: Mechanisms have been invented to prevent network congestion or to deal with a network collapse: The correct endpoint behavior is usually to repeat dropped information, but progressively slow the repetition rate. Provided all endpoints do this, the congestion lifts and the network resumes normal behavior. Other strategies such as slow start ensure that new connections don't overwhelm

441-763: A historically larger focus on private peering and commercial public peering, has much less traffic visible on public peering switch-fabrics compared to other regions that are dominated by non-profit membership exchange points. Collectively, the many exchange points operated by Equinix are generally considered to be the largest, though traffic figures are not generally published. Other important but smaller exchange points include AMS-IX in Amsterdam, LINX and LONAP in London , and NYIIX in New York . URLs to some public traffic statistics of exchange points include: A great deal of

504-404: A large file, graphic or web page, it usually advertises a window of between 32K and 64K. This results in the server sending a full window of data (assuming the file is larger than the window). When many applications simultaneously request downloads, this data can create a congestion point at an upstream provider. By reducing the window advertisement, the remote servers send less data, thus reducing

567-522: A large number of "smaller peers", or as a location for conducting low-cost "trial peering" without the expense of provisioning private peering on a temporary basis, while other larger networks are not willing to participate at public exchanges at all. A few exchange points, particularly in the United States, are operated by commercial carrier-neutral third parties, which are critical for achieving cost-effective data center connectivity. Private peering

630-479: A more direct path, reducing latency and packet loss . This also improves resiliency between consumers and content providers via multiple connections in many locations around the world, in particular during business disputes between the core transit providers. The majority of BGP AS-AS adjacencies are the product of multilateral peering agreements, or MLPAs. In multilateral peering, an unlimited number of parties agree to exchange traffic on common terms, using

693-476: A mutual benefit. Throughout the history of the Internet, there have been a spectrum of kinds of agreements between peers, ranging from handshake agreements to written contracts as required by one or more parties. Such agreements set forth the details of how traffic is to be exchanged, along with a list of expected activities which may be necessary to maintain the peering relationship, a list of activities which may be considered abusive and result in termination of

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756-476: A network is connected to the Internet if and only if it buys transit, or peers with every other network which also does not purchase transit (which together constitute a "default free zone" or "DFZ"). Public peering is done at Internet exchange points (IXPs), while private peering can be done with direct links between networks. Peering involves two networks coming together to exchange traffic with each other freely, and for mutual benefit. This 'mutual benefit'

819-469: A particular network will have a higher preference set on internal and customer advertisements. Settlement free peering is then configured to be preferred over paid IP transit. Networks that speak BGP to each other can engage in multi exit discriminator exchange with each other, although most do not. When networks interconnect in several locations, MEDs can be used to reference that network's interior gateway protocol cost. This results in both networks sharing

882-548: A reasonable and timely manner. Finally, Internet interconnection has become an issue in the international arena under something known as the International Charging Arrangements for Internet Services (ICAIS). In the ICAIS debate, countries underserved by Internet backbones have complained that it is unfair that they must pay the full cost of connecting to an Internet exchange point in a different country, frequently

945-446: A single agreement to which they each accede. The multilateral peering is typically technically instantiated in a route server or route reflector (which differ from looking glasses in that they serve routes back out to participants, rather than just listening to inbound routes) to redistribute routes via a BGP hub-and-spoke topology, rather than a partial-mesh topology. The two primary criticisms of multilateral peering are that it breaks

1008-463: A single physical port. Historically, public peering locations were known as network access points (NAPs). Today they are most often called exchange points or Internet exchanges ("IXP"). Many of the largest exchange points in the world can have hundreds of participants, and some span multiple buildings and colocation facilities across a city. Since public peering allows networks interested in peering to interconnect with many other networks through

1071-406: A single port, it is often considered to offer "less capacity" than private peering, but to a larger number of networks. Many smaller networks, or networks which are just beginning to peer, find that public peering exchange points provide an excellent way to meet and interconnect with other networks which may be open to peering with them. Some larger networks utilize public peering as a way to aggregate

1134-591: A single router, managed by PSI, and was initially located in Santa Clara , California. Paying CIX members were allowed to attach to the router directly or via leased lines. After some time, the router was also attached to the Pacific Bell SMDS cloud. The router was later moved to the Palo Alto Internet Exchange , or PAIX, which was developed and operated by Digital Equipment Corporation (DEC). Because

1197-734: A stable state where traffic demand is high but little useful throughput is available, during which packet delay and loss occur and quality of service is extremely poor. Congestive collapse was identified as a possible problem by 1984. It was first observed on the early Internet in October 1986, when the NSFNET phase-I backbone dropped three orders of magnitude from its capacity of 32 kbit/s to 40 bit/s, which continued until end nodes started implementing Van Jacobson and Sally Floyd 's congestion control between 1987 and 1988. When more packets were sent than could be handled by intermediate routers,

1260-438: A too big bandwidth flow according to some quality of service policy. A policy could then divide the bandwidth among all flows by some criteria. Another approach is to use Explicit Congestion Notification (ECN). ECN is used only when two hosts signal that they want to use it. With this method, a protocol bit is used to signal explicit congestion. This is better than the indirect congestion notification signaled by packet loss by

1323-425: A unique global BGP routing policy. The interconnection relationships between Autonomous Systems are of exactly two types: Therefore, in order for a network to reach any specific other network on the Internet, it must either: The Internet is based on the principle of global or end-to-end reachability , which means that any Internet user can transparently exchange traffic with any other Internet user. Therefore,

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1386-451: Is a voluntary interconnection of administratively separate Internet networks for the purpose of exchanging traffic between the "down-stream" users of each network. Peering is settlement -free, also known as "bill-and-keep" or "sender keeps all", meaning that neither party pays the other in association with the exchange of traffic; instead, each derives and retains revenue from its own customers. An agreement by two or more networks to peer

1449-710: Is a well known example. The first TCP implementations to handle congestion were described in 1984, but Van Jacobson's inclusion of an open source solution in the Berkeley Standard Distribution UNIX (" BSD ") in 1988 first provided good behavior. UDP does not control congestion. Protocols built atop UDP must handle congestion independently. Protocols that transmit at a fixed rate, independent of congestion, can be problematic. Real-time streaming protocols, including many Voice over IP protocols, have this property. Thus, special measures, such as quality of service, must be taken to keep packets from being dropped in

1512-432: Is easily filled by a single personal computer. Even on fast computer networks, the backbone can easily be congested by a few servers and client PCs. Denial-of-service attacks by botnets are capable of filling even the largest Internet backbone network links, generating large-scale network congestion. In telephone networks, a mass call event can overwhelm digital telephone circuits, in what can otherwise be defined as

1575-519: Is instantiated by a physical interconnection of the networks, an exchange of routing information through the Border Gateway Protocol (BGP) routing protocol, tacit agreement to norms of conduct and, in some extraordinarily rare cases (0.07%), a formalized contractual document. In 0.02% of cases the word "peering" is used to describe situations where there is some settlement involved. Because these outliers can be viewed as creating ambiguity,

1638-442: Is most often the motivation behind peering, which is often described solely by "reduced costs for transit services". Other less tangible motivations can include: The physical interconnections used for peering are categorized into two types: Public peering is accomplished across a Layer 2 access technology, generally called a shared fabric . At these locations, multiple carriers interconnect with one or more other carriers across

1701-436: Is no longer a mutual benefit, they may decide to cease peering: this is known as depeering . Some of the reasons why one network may wish to depeer another include: In some situations, networks which are being depeered have been known to attempt to fight to keep the peering by intentionally breaking the connectivity between the two networks when the peer is removed, either through a deliberate act or an act of omission. The goal

1764-476: Is performed by the network scheduler . One solution is to use random early detection (RED) on the network equipment's egress queue. On networking hardware ports with more than one egress queue, weighted random early detection (WRED) can be used. RED indirectly signals TCP sender and receiver by dropping some packets, e.g. when the average queue length is more than a threshold (e.g. 50%) and deletes linearly or cubically more packets, up to e.g. 100%, as

1827-401: Is present. This delayed packet loss interferes with TCP's automatic congestion avoidance. All flows that experience this packet loss begin a TCP retrain at the same moment – this is called TCP global synchronization . Active queue management (AQM) is the reordering or dropping of network packets inside a transmit buffer that is associated with a network interface controller (NIC). This task

1890-423: Is the direct interconnection between only two networks, across a Layer 1 or 2 medium that offers dedicated capacity that is not shared by any other parties. Early in the history of the Internet, many private peers occurred across "telco" provisioned SONET circuits between individual carrier-owned facilities. Today, most private interconnections occur at carrier hotels or carrier neutral colocation facilities, where

1953-514: Is the reduced quality of service that occurs when a network node or link is carrying more data than it can handle. Typical effects include queueing delay , packet loss or the blocking of new connections. A consequence of congestion is that an incremental increase in offered load leads either only to a small increase or even a decrease in network throughput . Network protocols that use aggressive retransmissions to compensate for packet loss due to congestion can increase congestion, even after

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2016-482: Is to force the depeering network to have so many customer complaints that they are willing to restore peering. Examples of this include forcing traffic via a path that does not have enough capacity to handle the load, or intentionally blocking alternate routes to or from the other network. Some notable examples of these situations have included: The "donut peering" model describes the intensive interconnection of small and medium-sized regional networks that make up much of

2079-697: Is typically accomplished by reducing the rate of packets. Whereas congestion control prevents senders from overwhelming the network , flow control prevents the sender from overwhelming the receiver . The theory of congestion control was pioneered by Frank Kelly , who applied microeconomic theory and convex optimization theory to describe how individuals controlling their own rates can interact to achieve an optimal network-wide rate allocation. Examples of optimal rate allocation are max-min fair allocation and Kelly's suggestion of proportionally fair allocation, although many others are possible. Let x i {\displaystyle x_{i}} be

2142-560: The Federal Communications Commission 's advisory committee, the Network Reliability and Interoperability Council recommended that Internet backbones publish their peering policies, something that they had been hesitant to do beforehand . The FCC has also reviewed competition in the backbone market in its Section 706 proceedings which review whether advanced telecommunications are being provided to all Americans in

2205-420: The United States alone. Essentially all of these plans were abandoned following the dot-com bust , and today it is considered both economically and technically infeasible to support this level of interconnection among even the largest of networks. The Internet is a collection of separate and distinct networks referred to as autonomous systems , each one consisting of a set of globally unique IP addresses and

2268-532: The CIX operated at OSI layer 3 , rather than OSI layer 2 , and because it was not neutral, in the sense that it was operated by one of its participants rather than by all of them collectively, and it conducted lobbying activities supported by some of its participants and not by others, it would not today be considered an Internet exchange point. Nonetheless, it was the first thing to bear that name. The first exchange point to resemble modern, neutral, Ethernet-based exchanges

2331-453: The Internet. Traffic between these regional networks can be modeled as a toroid , with a core " donut hole " that is poorly interconnected to the networks around it. As detailed above , some carriers attempted to form a cartel of self-described Tier 1 networks , nominally refusing to peer with any networks outside the oligopoly . Seeking to reduce transit costs, connections between regional networks bypass those "core" networks. Data takes

2394-721: The National Information Infrastructure document. All four are now defunct or no longer functioning as Internet exchange points: As the Internet grew, and traffic levels increased, these NAPs became a network bottleneck . Most of the early NAPs utilized FDDI technology, which provided only 100 Mbit/s of capacity to each participant. Some of these exchanges upgraded to ATM technology, which provided OC-3 (155 Mbit/s) and OC-12 (622 Mbit/s) of capacity. Other prospective exchange point operators moved directly into offering Ethernet technology, such as gigabit Ethernet (1,000 Mbit/s), which quickly became

2457-618: The RED/WRED algorithms, but it requires support by both hosts. When a router receives a packet marked as ECN-capable and the router anticipates congestion, it sets the ECN flag, notifying the sender of congestion. The sender should respond by decreasing its transmission bandwidth, e.g., by decreasing its sending rate by reducing the TCP window size or by other means. Congestion avoidance can be achieved efficiently by reducing traffic. When an application requests

2520-491: The US. In some worst-case scenarios, traffic from one side of a street is brought all the way to a distant exchange point in a foreign country, exchanged, and then returned to another side of the street. Countries with liberalized telecommunications and open markets, where competition between backbone providers occurs, tend to oppose ICAIS. Network congestion Network congestion in data networking and queueing theory

2583-466: The United States. These advocates argue that Internet interconnection should work like international telephone interconnection, with each party paying half of the cost. Those who argue against ICAIS point out that much of the problem would be solved by building local exchange points. A significant amount of the traffic, it is argued, that is brought to the US and exchanged then leaves the US, using US exchange points as switching offices but not terminating in

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2646-407: The appropriate adjustments. The protocols that avoid congestive collapse generally assume that data loss is caused by congestion. On wired networks, errors during transmission are rare. WiFi , 3G and other networks with a radio layer are susceptible to data loss due to interference and may experience poor throughput in some cases. The TCP connections running over a radio-based physical layer see

2709-453: The burden of transporting each other's traffic on their own network (or cold potato ). Hot-potato or nearest-exit routing, which is typically the normal behavior on the Internet, is where traffic destined to another network is delivered to the closest interconnection point. Internet interconnection is not regulated in the same way that public telephone network interconnection is regulated. Nevertheless, Internet interconnection has been

2772-476: The complexity in the BGP routing protocol exists to aid the enforcement and fine-tuning of peering and transit agreements. BGP allows operators to define a policy that determines where traffic is routed. Three things are commonly used to determine routing: local-preference, multi exit discriminators (MEDs) and AS-Path . Local-preference is used internally within a network to differentiate classes of networks. For example,

2835-471: The congestion. Backward ECN (BECN) is another proposed congestion notification mechanism. It uses ICMP source quench messages as an IP signaling mechanism to implement a basic ECN mechanism for IP networks, keeping congestion notifications at the IP level and requiring no negotiation between network endpoints. Effective congestion notifications can be propagated to transport layer protocols, such as TCP and UDP, for

2898-434: The corresponding vectors and matrix. Let U ( x ) {\displaystyle U(x)} be an increasing, strictly concave function , called the utility , which measures how much benefit a user obtains by transmitting at rate x {\displaystyle x} . The optimal rate allocation then satisfies The Lagrange dual of this problem decouples so that each flow sets its own rate, based only on

2961-570: The data loss and tend to erroneously believe that congestion is occurring. The slow-start protocol performs badly for short connections. Older web browsers created many short-lived connections and opened and closed the connection for each file. This kept most connections in the slow start mode. Initial performance can be poor, and many connections never get out of the slow-start regime, significantly increasing latency. To avoid this problem, modern browsers either open multiple connections simultaneously or reuse one connection for all files requested from

3024-459: The efficiency with which new peers can begin contributing routes to the exchange. While optional multilateral peering agreements and route servers are now widely acknowledged to be a good practice, mandatory multilateral peering agreements (MMLPAs) have long been agreed to not be a good practice. The modern Internet operates with significantly more peering locations than at any time in the past, resulting in improved performance and better routing for

3087-427: The initial load has been reduced to a level that would not normally have induced network congestion. Such networks exhibit two stable states under the same level of load. The stable state with low throughput is known as congestive collapse . Networks use congestion control and congestion avoidance techniques to try to avoid collapse. These include: exponential backoff in protocols such as CSMA/CA in 802.11 and

3150-472: The intermediate routers discarded many packets, expecting the endpoints of the network to retransmit the information. However, early TCP implementations had poor retransmission behavior. When this packet loss occurred, the endpoints sent extra packets that repeated the information lost, doubling the incoming rate. Congestion control modulates traffic entry into a telecommunications network in order to avoid congestive collapse resulting from oversubscription. This

3213-746: The majority of the traffic on the Internet. However, in the interests of reducing costs and improving efficiency, most networks have attempted to standardize on relatively few locations within these individual regions where they will be able to quickly and efficiently interconnect with their peering partners. As of 2021, the largest exchange points in the world are Ponto de Troca de Tráfego Metro São Paulo , in São Paulo , with 2,289 peering networks; OpenIXP in Jakarta , with 1,097 peering networks; and DE-CIX in Frankfurt , with 1,050 peering networks. The United States, with

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3276-561: The phrase "settlement-free peering" is sometimes used to explicitly denote normal cost-free peering. The first Internet exchange point was the Commercial Internet eXchange (CIX), formed by Alternet / UUNET (now Verizon Business ), PSI , and CERFNET to exchange traffic without regard for whether the traffic complied with the acceptable use policy (AUP) of the NSFNet or ANS' interconnection policy. The CIX infrastructure consisted of

3339-440: The predominant choice for Internet exchange points due to the reduced cost and increased capacity offered. Today, almost all significant exchange points operate solely over Ethernet, and most of the largest exchange points offer 10, 40, and even 100 gigabit service. During the dot-com boom , many exchange point and carrier-neutral colocation providers had plans to build as many as 50 locations to promote carrier interconnection in

3402-462: The presence of congestion. Connection-oriented protocols , such as the widely used TCP protocol, watch for packet loss or queuing delay to adjust their transmission rate. Various network congestion avoidance processes support different trade-offs. The TCP congestion avoidance algorithm is the primary basis for congestion control on the Internet. Problems occur when concurrent TCP flows experience tail-drops , especially when bufferbloat

3465-480: The queue fills further. The robust random early detection (RRED) algorithm was proposed to improve the TCP throughput against denial-of-service (DoS) attacks, particularly low-rate denial-of-service (LDoS) attacks. Experiments confirmed that RED-like algorithms were vulnerable under LDoS attacks due to the oscillating TCP queue size caused by the attacks. Some network equipment is equipped with ports that can follow and measure each flow and are thereby able to signal

3528-552: The rate of flow i {\displaystyle i} , c l {\displaystyle c_{l}} be the capacity of link l {\displaystyle l} , and r l i {\displaystyle r_{li}} be 1 if flow i {\displaystyle i} uses link l {\displaystyle l} and 0 otherwise. Let x {\displaystyle x} , c {\displaystyle c} and R {\displaystyle R} be

3591-467: The relationship, and details concerning how the relationship can be terminated. Detailed contracts of this type are typically used between the largest ISPs, as well as the ones operating in the most heavily regulated economies. As of 2011, such contracts account for less than 0.5% of all peering agreements. By definition, peering is the voluntary and free exchange of traffic between two networks, for mutual benefit. If one or both networks believes that there

3654-436: The router before congestion detection initiates. Common router congestion avoidance mechanisms include fair queuing and other scheduling algorithms , and random early detection (RED) where packets are randomly dropped as congestion is detected. This proactively triggers the endpoints to slow transmission before congestion collapse occurs. Some end-to-end protocols are designed to behave well under congested conditions; TCP

3717-417: The shared fate of the forwarding and routing planes, since the layer-2 connection between two participants could hypothetically fail while their layer-2 connections with the route server remained up, and that they force all participants to treat each other with the same, undifferentiated, routing policy. The primary benefit of multilateral peering is that it minimizes configuration for each peer, while maximizing

3780-618: The similar CSMA/CD in the original Ethernet , window reduction in TCP , and fair queueing in devices such as routers and network switches . Other techniques that address congestion include priority schemes which transmit some packets with higher priority ahead of others and the explicit allocation of network resources to specific flows through the use of admission control . Network resources are limited, including router processing time and link throughput . Resource contention may occur on networks in several common circumstances. A wireless LAN

3843-499: The size of the routing tables worldwide. CRIX is hosted by ECC at its data center . A 2005 report for the Arab Telecommunications and Information Council of Ministers concluded that the exchange was being under-utilized and that there was no real peering between Arab countries. This Internet-related article is a stub . You can help Misplaced Pages by expanding it . Peering In computer networking , peering

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3906-463: The subject of several areas of federal policy in the United States. Perhaps the most dramatic example of this is the attempted MCI Worldcom / Sprint merger. In this case, the Department of Justice blocked the merger specifically because of the impact of the merger on the Internet backbone market (thereby requiring MCI to divest itself of its successful "internetMCI" business to gain approval). In 2001,

3969-527: Was the Metropolitan Area Ethernet , or MAE, in Tysons Corner , Virginia . When the United States government de-funded the NSFNET backbone, Internet exchange points were needed to replace its function, and initial governmental funding was used to aid the preexisting MAE and bootstrap three other exchanges, which they dubbed NAPs, or " Network Access Points ," in accordance with the terminology of

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