Internet passed the test of the Pandemic
The Internet traffic has seen a growth of up to several hundred percent during the pandemic lockdowns and it has coped surprisingly well. Very few other critical infrastructures would be able to sustain such growth while still providing service at acceptable quality. This is the conclusion of a new study that looked at different aspects of the Internet infrastructure, which was undertaken by a group of CRNA researchers.
When a third of the World’s population went into lockdown due to the first Covid-19 wave in the spring of 2020, we experienced an unprecedented increase in internet usage, confirming once again the critical role the Internet plays in our economies and livelihoods. Physical meeting places were replaced with virtual ones as work and schooling activities turned to the internet in their efforts to maintaining “business as usual. At least, as far as possible. At the time there were concerns whether the Internet would cope with this paradigm shift.
While there have been some technological challenges in terms of speed, delay and outages, the underlying infrastructure has clearly risen to the challenge. A group of researchers from CRNA found that architecture of the Internet has been robust enough to cope with the increased traffic. The main reason is the flexible and scalable design of its key components: DNS (Domain Name System) and BGP (Border Gateway Protocol). DNS is a central part of the internet, providing a way to match names (a website you're seeking) to numbers (the address for the website). BGP is a standardized exterior gateway protocol designed to exchange routing and reachability information among autonomous systems (AS) on the Internet.
The researchers found that dynamics of the BGP routing has changed during the lockdown period. There has been a reduction in transient routing changes and increased signs of traffic engineering. These indicate that network providers performed less maintenance and were focused on engineering for absorbing the spike in traffic.
Video Conferencing services have, as we know, seen an exceptional growth in demand. A case study undertaken by the CRNA research team found that clever engineering responses and long-term investment have allowed them to respond rapidly to the increased demand. For instance, by lowering the picture quality (resolution), they instantly allowed for increased traffic to get through.
Figure above: Video conferencing traffic growth in a global video network
The lockdown period has pushed the Internet to a new operating point, which can help answering several questions about the Internet architecture. Differences in data plane performance across countries could give a window into evaluating and comparing the state of Internet infrastructure in different parts of the world. The outages that took place during the pandemic deserve further attention, since they can help revealing structural weaknesses and vulnerabilities.
We believe that practitioners, regulators and researchers may benefit from revisiting how the Internet fared during the early days of the pandemic in more detail. This can help draw causal links between the observed performance and the Internet architecture as well as prior investments in infrastructure.
The article “A Multi-Perspective Study of Internet Performance during the COVID-19 Outbreak” has been written by Ahmed Elmokashfi, Alfred Arouna, Ioana Livadariu, Mah-Rukh Fida, Amund Kvalbein, Anas Al-Selwi, Thomas Dreibholz and Haakon Bryhni.
You can read the full article here.