A Hop Away from Everywhere: A View of the Intercontinental Long-haul Infrastructure

We present a longitudinal study of intercontinental long-haul links (LHLs) - links with latencies significantly higher than that of all other links in a traceroute path. Our study is motivated by the recognition of these LHLs as a network-layer manifestation of critical transoceanic undersea cables. We present a methodology and associated processing system for identifying long-haul links in traceroute measurements. We apply this system to a large corpus of traceroute data and report on multiple aspects of long haul connectivity including country-level prevalence, routers as international gateways, preferred long-haul destinations, and the evolution of these characteristics over a 7 year period. We identify 85,620 layer-3 links (out of 2.7M links in a large traceroute dataset) that satisfy our definition for intercontinental long haul with many of them terminating in a relatively small number of nodes. An analysis of connected components shows a clearly dominant component with a relative size that remains stable despite a significant growth of the long-haul infrastructure.