Problem: Predicting round-trip time (RTT) between any two arbitrary hosts (to which you have no access) in the Internet is very hard.
Our Solution: King tool. King estimates RTT between any two hosts in the Internet by estimating the RTT between their domain name servers. In order to do this, King depends on the following fact which hold true for most of the domain name servers in the current Internet. Most domain name servers in the current Internet (~75%-80%) support recursive queries from any host in the Internet. The accuracy of King depends crucially on another fact about the domain name servers in the Internet. In many cases the name servers are located close (measured as network latency) to their hosts. While the first fact is the result of a default choice by many name server administrators the second fact arises more out of administrative convenience than anything else.
Papers:
King: Estimating Latency between Arbitrary Internet End
Hosts
by Krishna P. Gummadi, Stefan Saroiu and Steven D. Gribble.
To appear in the Proceedings of SIGCOMM IMW 2002,
November 2002, Marseille, France.
(.pdf,
297 KB), (.ps.gz,
296 KB)
Posters:
King: Estimating Latency between Arbitrary Internet End
Hosts
by Krishna P. Gummadi, Stefan Saroiu and Steven D. Gribble.
To be presented at SIGCOMM 2002, August 2002, Pittsburgh,
PA USA.
(.ppt,
430 KB), (.pdf,
544 KB)
(A one page write-up
is to appear in SIGCOMM CCR).
Main issues with the existing solutions: (1) Unlike King, they require deployment of additional infrastructure in the current Internet. (2) These techniques model the Internet in different ways, and make some implicit simplifying assumptions. It is not yet clear if the models can work in the face of complex routing policies and structure of the Internet.