A study on geographic properties of internet routing

In order to make a better control over the routing of Internet traffic, more and more researchers and governments want to understand how international reachability depends on individual countries. It has been necessary and valuable for us to study the geographic properties of Internet routing. In this paper, we conduct a measurement study on the dataset from 2011 to 2015 to understand two geographic properties of Internet routing: geographically routing circuitousness of paths and geographically routing centrality of countries and continents. Our analysis shows that the routing circuitousness of our Internet is deteriorating in these years. We also find that United States, Great British, France and Germany have most control over the data transfer in the Internet, but their farness centrality indexes are not smallest. Furthermore, our temporal analysis on the routing dependence among countries and continents finds out the importance of Europe was decreasing comparing with its competitor North America in the past years.