On the stability of network distance estimation

Estimating end-to-end Internet distance can benefit many applications and services, such as efficient overlay construction, overlay routing and location, and peer-topeer systems. While there have been many proposals on Internet distance estimation, how to design and build a scalable, accurate and dynamic monitoring system is still an open issue. To this end, we propose an overlay distance monitoring system, Internet Iso-bar, which yields good estimation accuracy with much less overhead for online monitoring than the existing systems. Internet Iso-bar clusters hosts based on the similarity of their perceived network distance, and chooses the center of each cluster as a monitor site. The distance between two hosts is estimated using inter- or intra-cluster distances. Evaluation using real Internet measurements shows that Internet Iso-bar achieves high estimation accuracy and stability with much smaller measurement overhead than Global Network Positioning (GNP) [1]. Furthermore, by adjus...

• Type: Journal
• Year: 2002
• Where: SIGMETRICS
• Authors: Yan Chen, Khian Hao Lim, Randy H. Katz, Chris Overton
• Keywords: Estimation Accuracy, Hardware, Internet, Internet Distance, SIGMETRICS 2002