We are very proud of our student Cristian Trusin who presented his bachelor's research about the Russia and Ukraine war at the International Conference on Network and Service Management (CNSM) in Thessaloniki, Greece (October 31 - November 4, 2022). CNSM is an important conference about computer networks co-sponsored by IEEE Communications Society, IFIP, and ACM.
Cristian was born in Floresti, Moldova, a small town of 10,000 inhabitants 50 km from the border with Ukraine. His origins were one of the great motivators for the paper "The Effect of the Russian-Ukrainian Conflict from the Perspective of Internet eXchanges".
In 2022 the Russian invasion of Ukraine began. It is known that Ukraine faced outages because of the damage to its infrastructure. It is also known that Russia was boycotted by the international community. However, the impact on the telecommunications of the two countries remains unknown. In his paper, he quantified the degree to which the Internet was affected in both countries by analyzing datasets from five large Internet Exchange Points (IXPs) collected by the DACS group. IXPs provide a central point of interconnection where internet traffic can be freely exchanged between Autonomous Systems (ASes). This centrality makes IXPs a good vantage point for analyzing changes in the Internet infrastructure. With data collected before and after the start of the conflict, he observed considerable damage to the Ukrainian Internet network with numerous outages and minimal damage to the Russian network. An average of 11% of Ukrainian ASes were unreachable at each IXP. He also identified the biggest outages and the events responsible for them. The paper highlights resilience issues during conflicts to the network and management community and serves as a basis for future more in-depth research.
