Abstract
On the Effectiveness of Measurement Reuse for Performance-Based Detouring
David R. Choffnes and Fabián E. Bustamante
Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science
Northwestern University
Evanston, IL 60201, USA
{drchoffnes,fabianb}@cs.northwestern.edu
For both technological and economic reasons, the
default path between two end systems in the wide-area Internet
can be suboptimal. This observation has motivated a number of
systems that attempt to improve reliability and performance by
routing over one or more hops in an overlay. Most of the proposed
solutions, however, fall at an extreme in the cost-performance
trade-off. While some provide near-optimal performance with
an unscalable measurement overhead, others avoid measurement
when selecting routes around network failures but make no
attempt to optimize performance.
This paper presents an experimental evaluation of an alternative
approach to scalable, performance detouring based
on the strategic reuse of measurements from other large-scale
distributed systems, namely content distribution networks (CDN).
By relying on CDN redirections as hints on network conditions,
higher performance paths are readily found with little overhead
and no active network measurement. We report results from a
study of more than 13,700 paths between 170 widely-distributed
hosts over a three-week period, showing the advantages of this
approach. We demonstrate the practicality of our approach by
implementing an FTP suite that uses our publicly available
SideStep library to take advantage of these improved Internet
routes.
The slides from our presentation (to appear):
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