THE IMPACT OF COVID-19 PANDEMIC ON INTERNET TRAFFIC IN SAUDI ARABIA

Abstract

The new Corona virus infected almost all countries all over the world, including Saudi Arabia, forcing many of them to close their borders and impose multiple curfews. We noticed an impact on the quality of Internet services in the Kingdom. In this paper, we studied the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on the Internet in the Kingdom Saudi Arabia. To analyze the Internet traffic characteristics, we used RIPE Atlas, which is the largest open-source Internet measurement network ever made. We focused on two aspects that affect the users’ quality of experience the most, namely: latency and routing. Our results show a 55.95% latency increase after the lockdown in Saudi Arabia. Our analysis also shows an acute change in the routing path from Saudi Arabia to USA, where the number of hops goes from 9 hops during the closure to only 2 hops after the curfew period, a change of 77.78%.