On the Placement of Internet Instrumentation

S. Jamin, C. Jin, Y. Jin, D. Raz, Y. Shavitt, and L. Zhang

Abstract:
=========

The IDMaps project aims at providing a distance map of the Internet
from which the relative distances between points on the Internet can
be gauged.  Distance map is a service that many
distributed systems and applications can benefit, for example, a
common method to improve user perceived performance of the Internet is
to place data and server mirrors closer to the clients.  When a client
tries to access a mirrored server, which mirror should it access?  With
IDMaps, the closest mirror can be determined based on distance estimates
between the client and the mirrors.  In this paper we
investigate both graph theoretic methods and ad hoc heuristics
for instrumenting the Internet to obtain distance maps.  We evaluate
the efficacy of the resulting distance maps by comparing the
determinations of closest replica using known topology against those
obtained from the distance maps.