This episode of PING features Emile Aben from the RIPE NCC’s R&D Department. Emile is a Senior Research Engineer who has spent more than fifteen years working on Internet measurement at RIPE, including the Atlas platform and the RIPE Routing Information Service (RIS) Border Gateway Protocol (BGP) data collection system.
Emile and his collaborator, Romain Fontugne from IIJ Labs in Tokyo, have been developing a model to quantify how different ASes influence global BGP connectivity, based on the impact they have on others’ transit choices. They call this metric ‘AS Hegemony‘. Emile has been using it to correct for sample bias in RIPE RIS and Atlas data, allowing him to better interpret changes in network topology and routing during sudden shocks such as cable cuts. He has applied this approach to recent disruptions in the Baltic, around Africa, and during the power outage on the Iberian Peninsula.
Emile has also been exploring new approaches to data storage and visualization. His RIPE colleague Ties de Kok has been experimenting with Parquet as a data abstraction layer, which has enabled Emile to run faster analyses and test new 3D, in-browser visualization techniques.
Read more about AS Hegemony, and the new data visualizations on the web:
- How RIS Saw the Iberian Power Outage (RIPE 90 plenary presentation, May 2025)
- A Deep Dive Into the Baltic Sea Cable Cuts (RIPE Labs, December 2024)
- AS Hegemony: A Robust Metric for AS Centrality (SIGCOMM 2017 poster)
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