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 in-browser.

Read more about AS Hegemony, and the new data visualisations on the web:

• How RIS Saw the Iberian Power Outage (RIPE90 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)