DMaps: A Global Internet Host Distance Estimation Service
Sugih Jamin
There is an increasing need to quickly and efficiently learn
network distances, in terms of metrics such as latency or bandwidth,
between Internet hosts. For example, Internet content providers often
place data and server mirrors throughout the Internet to improve
access latency for clients, and it is necessary to direct clients to
the closest mirrors based on some distance metric in order to realize
the benefit of mirrors. We suggest a scalable Internet-wide
architecture, called IDMaps, which measures and disseminates distance
information on the global Internet. Higher-level services can collect
such distance information to build a virtual distance map of the
Internet and estimate the distance between any pair of IP addresses.
We present our solutions to the measurement server placement and
distance map construction problems in IDMaps. We show that IDMaps can
indeed provide useful distance estimations to applications such as
closest-mirror selection.
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