Chavula and Phokeer win Outstanding Paper Award at AFRICON-2017

Computer science PhD student Amreesh Phokeer and graduating Josiah Chavula’s paper about the African Internet was awarded an ‘Outstanding Paper Award’ at the 13th IEEE AFRICON-2017 international conference that was held recently in Cape Town. The paper, entitled “An Insight Into Africa’s Country-level Latencies”, was written in collaboration with Agustin Formoso of the Latin America and Caribbean Network Information Centre (LACNIC) and Nick Feamster of Princeton University, USA. 

The paper reports on a large-scale measurement study of the African Internet. It focuses on mapping the performance and topological characteristics of intra-Africa connectivity. Their analysis discovered a series of ‘clusters’, in which countries have built up low delay interconnectivity, dispelling the myth that intra-delays in Africa are universally poor. They also found that some countries had much higher intra-country latencies than expected, pointing to the lack of local peering or physical infrastructure within the countries. This finding underscores the importance of physical computer networking infrastructure deployment and inter-network relationships at a country and regional level. To explain this, they explored the intra-continental topology and discovered a number of shortcomings, most notably an excessive reliance on international transit providers rather than local peering. 

Congratulations on the achievement!