Abstract: Hypergiants, such as Google or Netflix, are important organisations in the Internet ecosystem, due to their sheer impact in terms of traffic volume exchanged. However, beyond naming specific instances, the research community still lacks a sufficiently crisp understanding of them.  In this paper, we analyse PeeringDB data and identify features that differentiate hypergiants from the other organisations. To this end, we first characterise the organisations present in PeeringDB, allowing us to identify discriminating properties of these organisations. We then use these properties to separate the data in two clusters, differentiating hypergiants from other organisations. We conclude by investigating how hypergiants and other organisations exploit the IXP ecosystem to reach the global IPv4 space.

Short Bio: Timm Böttger is a PhD student at Queen Mary University of London.  His research interests centre around Internet measurements and performance. He is interested in infrastructures and distributed systems used for today’s large-scale content delivery networks, especially in the role IXPs play to enable such large-scale systems. His studies at QMUL started in 2015 under the supervision of Steve Uhlig and Felix Cuadrado. Before joining QMUL, he was a student at Technical University of Munich.