About this episode

Emile Aben discusses adjusting for data source bias in Internet measurements and the concept of AS Hegemony.

This time PING features Emile Aben from the RIPE NCC R&D Department. Emile is a Senior Research Engineer, and for over a decade and a half has been looking at Internet Measurement at RIPE in the Atlas system, and in the RIPE RIS BGP data collection. Emile and a collaborator Romain Fontugne from IIJ Labs in Tokyo have been exploring a model of the influence and effect on global connectivity in BGP for different AS, based on the impact they have on other AS’s transit choices. They call this “AS Hegemony” and Emile has been using it to adjust for sample bias in the data being collected in RIPE RIS and in the Atlas network. This approach to re-balancing the sources helps Emile to understand changes in network topology and routing under rapid shocks like cable cuts and he’s been applying this to the recent spate of cable outages in the Baltic, around Africa, and the power outage on the Iberian Peninsula. Emile has also been looking at new ways of holding data, and visualising data. His RIPE colleague Ties de Kok has explored use of “Parquet” as a data abstraction tool and this has allowed Emile to perform rapid analysis and experiment in new data visualisations in 3D, rendered…

People in this episode

Guest: Emile Aben

Topics covered

• Internet Measurement
• BGP
• Data Bias
• Network Topology
• Data Visualization
• AS Hegemony

Keywords

• Internet Measurement
• BGP
• AS Hegemony
• data visualization
• network topology
• cable outages
• sample bias

Mentioned in this episode

Organizations: RIPE NCC, IIJ Labs, RIPE

Places: Baltic, Africa, Iberian Peninsula

More episodes of PING

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• What does “BCP” really mean? · April 1, 2026 · 27 min
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• Measuring the use of DNS over IPv6 · March 4, 2026 · 53 min
• Internet measurement in Thailand · February 18, 2026 · 21 min
• BGP in review for 2025 · February 4, 2026 · 58 min

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