Find Out: How Do Your Data Packets Travel?

In today’s communication-centric world, users generate and exchange a massive amount of data. The Internet helps user data to travel from one part of the world to another, via a complex set of network systems. These systems are intelligent, heterogeneous, and non-transparent to users. This paper presents an extensive, trace-driven study of user data traffic covering five years of observations, six large ISPs, 22 different autonomous systems, and a total of 12 countries. This work aims to make users aware of how their data travels in the Internet, as the interests of ISPs majorly influence the data traffic path. Although data traffic should prefer to travel through countries that share land borders, we found that the shortest land distance between the two countries does not impact data path selection.