Internet eXchange Points (IXPs) are generally considered to be the
successors of the four Network Access Points that were mandated as
part of the decommissioning of the NSFNET in 1994/95 to facilitate the
transition to "public Internet" as we know it today. While this
does not tell the whole story of the early beginnings, what is true is
that since around 1994, the number of IXPs has grown to more than 300
with the largest IXPs handling traffic volumes comparable to those of
Tier-1 ISPs. But IXPs have never attracted much attention from the
research community. At first glance, this lack of interest seems
understandable as IXPs have apparently little to do with current
"hot" topic areas such as data centers and cloud services or software
defined networking (SDN) and mobile communication.
However, we argue that, in fact, IXPs are not only cool monitoring
points with huge visibility but are all about Internet connectivity
data centers and cloud services and even SDN and mobile communication.
To this end, we in this talk start with an overview of the basic
technical and operational aspects of IXPs and then highlight some of
our research results regarding application mix, AS-graph, Internet
infrastructure distribution, and traffic flows.