Concurrent with recent theoretical interest in the problem of metric embedding, a growing body of research in the networking community has studied the distance matrix defined by node-to-node latencies in the Internet, resulting in a number of recent approaches that approximately embed this distance matrix into low-dimensional Euclidean space. There is a fundamental distinction, however, between the theoretical approaches to the embedding problem and this recent Internet-related work: in addition to computational limitations, Internet measurement algorithms operate under the constraint that it is only feasible to measure a linear (or near-linear) number of node pairs, and typically in a highly structured way. Indeed, the most common framework for Internet measurements of this type is a beacon-based approach: one chooses uniformly at random a constant number of nodes (`beacons') in the network, each node measures its distance to all beacons, and one then has access to only these me...
Jon M. Kleinberg, Aleksandrs Slivkins, Tom Wexler