PIC: Practical Internet Coordinates for Distance Estimation
Manuel Costa
This talk introduces PIC, a practical coordinate-based mechanism to
estimate Internet network distance (i.e., round-trip delay or network
hops). Network distance estimation is important in many applications,
for example,
network-aware overlay construction and server selection. There are
several proposals for distance estimation in the Internet but they all
suffer from problems that limit their benefit. Most rely on a small set
of infrastructure nodes that are a single point of failure and limit
scalability. Others use sets of peers to compute coordinates but these
coordinates can be arbitrarily wrong if one of these peers is malicious.
While it may be reasonable to secure a small set of infrastructure
nodes, it is unreasonable to secure all peers. PIC addresses these
problems: it does not rely on infrastructure nodes and it can compute
accurate coordinates even when some peers are malicious. We present
PIC's design, experimental evaluation, and an application to
network-aware overlay construction. Our results indicate that PIC can
reduce the overhead of network-aware overlay construction by almost an
order of magnitude.
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