Internet eXchange Points (IXPs) have significantly transformed the structure and economics of the Internet by allowing many nearby networks to connect directly, avoiding the need for service providers. These large IXPs are so beneficial that they are not just used by nearby networks, but also by far away Autonomous Systems (AS). This is made possible by Remote Peering (RP), which typically involves the use of RP resellers to access remote IXPs. In this paper, we evaluate the effects of RP on four different routing aspects, using a representative group of IXPs located on three continents: (a) growth of RP deployment over one and a half years; (b) presence of route announcement mispractices (when networks prioritize the remote IXP over the local IXP), which are associated to routing anomalies; (c) reliability of RP interfaces and (d) adoption of RP-related BGP communities, i.e. to perform traffic engineering to remote peers. We make our data and results available to the community via a web portal.

Border Gateway Protocol (BGP) communities, an optional message attribute, allow network operators to tag BGP announcements and act on routing decisions. Although widely used, it is so far unclear how prevalent the different types of communities are and the degree to which the different traffic engineering actions have been used. There are two major reasons for this gap: few community values have been standardised and the limited visibility at route collectors.