Josiah Chavula, Melissa Densmore and Hussein Suleman, University of Cape Town, South Africa

Active topology measurements on the African Internet have showed that over 75% of the intra-Africa traffic destined for Africa's National Research and Education Net- works (NRENs) uses intercontinental links, resulting in high latencies and data transmission costs. The goal of this work is to investigate how latency-based path selection using Locator/Identifier Separation Protocol (LISP) and Software Defined Networking (SDN) in NRENs can be used to reduce inter-NREN latencies. We present aspects of an experimental prototype implementation for real-time topology probes to discover lower-latency remote gateways and dynamic configuration of end-to-end Internet paths. Simulation results indicate that ranking remote ingress gateways, and dynamic configuration of end-to-end paths between gateways can lower the average latency for inter-NREN traffic exchange.

Software Defined Networking, Traffic Engineering, Latency, Internet exchange points, African National Research and Education Networks (NRENs)