About the International Internet Flow Quantification (IIFQ) Project

Problem Statement

Since the privatization of the Internet in 1992, the international flows of Internet bandwidth have not been visible in the whole. Accordingly, governments have little insight into the volumes and directions of international Internet traffic and no way of quantifying the relative significance of the other nations with which they exchange traffic. As of November 2023, 159 countries both produce and consume Internet bandwidth, while 51 are consumers only. Understanding the balance of trade in Internet bandwidth—which other countries supply your consumers with bandwidth and which countries your IXPs export to—is the goal of the IIFQ project.

Project Goals

The International Internet Flow Quantification (IIFQ) project is producing a long-term time-series dataset of international traffic data, focusing on relative volumes of traffic exchanged between nations. The data characterizes the portion of domestically produced Internet bandwidth consumed within each participating country and the portion exported to every other country, as well as the relative popularity of different Internet protocols such as web, email, and videoconferencing. As the dataset becomes complete, it will also characterize the portion of consumed Internet bandwidth procured from domestic sources within each country, versus that imported from every other country. The dataset is available to the public and published under a Creative Commons license to ensure open access.

Mechanism

The OECD’s IIFQ project is implemented in partnership with SWITCH, the Swiss Research and Education Network, and Packet Clearing House (PCH), the intergovernmental treaty organization responsible for supporting critical Internet infrastructure. The project utilizes open-source software written and maintained by SWITCH to receive standardized flow data produced by the Internet exchange points (IXPs) within each country. These national aggregation points, operated by PCH at IXPs, will reduce the data to national-level statistics and upload it at five-minute resolution to three permanent archives maintained and published for public access independently by the sponsoring organizations.

Data-Handling Safeguards

No packet contents are ever seen by the system, and data is typically sampled at a rate of no more than one header per million flows. Participating IXPs may truncate IP addresses to enclosing blocks to anonymize them prior to submission to the local IIFQ aggregator. In any event, no IP addresses are retained or published; at each location they are counted toward AS-level and country-level statistics and then immediately discarded, before the aggregate statistical data is transmitted to the archive. All data-processing is performed using open-source software, which is available for review and has been analyzed by both engineering and legal teams for compliance with the highest standards of privacy and security.

Data

All IIFQ data will be published for public use under a Creative Commons Attribution (cc-by) license. A data download selector will be made available to allow the downloading of selected portions of the dataset, an index of publications which utilize IIFQ data will be maintained, and a gallery of visualizations will be published, showcasing the ways researchers have graphed and charted their analyses.

Next Steps

The IIFQ project is currently in alpha testing in South Africa's IXPs. Application for participating in beta testing can be made by communicating with the OECD or PCH. Countries wishing to be represented in the dataset should encourage their IXPs to participate. Packet Clearing House can facilitate IXP participation through its usual support channels. Initial contact by either governments or IXPs can be made by emailing iifq@pch.net or speaking with any of PCH’s outreach personnel.