Project Kijiji: building a GNN-based routing intelligence platform for fragile networks

Project Kijiji is an innovative real-time platform designed to address and predict inefficiencies in African internet routing by analyzing potential impacts of new Internet Exchange Point (IXP) peering agreements. Utilizing a Graph Neural Network (GNN) trained on BGP event streams and supported by Tinybird's real-time data pipelines, the platform seeks to mitigate "trombone" detours, where African internet traffic is unnecessarily routed through European hubs due to insufficient local peering agreements. By embedding a detailed data model into every event at ingestion, Project Kijiji efficiently categorizes routing events and prioritizes latency reduction in regions with lower GDP. The system's architecture allows for high-cardinality, append-only data aggregation, crucial for real-time path analysis. The project aims to transition from synthetic data to live BGP ingestion, offer APIs for ISPs to query potential latency dividends, and submit findings for academic validation, all while maintaining an open-source ethos under the guidance of AI Engineer Elvis Muchiri.