Estimating Internet Path Properties for Distributed Applications

Estimating network path properties such as latency, loss and available bandwidth is crucial to assist distributed applications such as P2P make the best use of Internet resources. Though quite a number of approaches are proposed to estimate these metrics, they have disadvantages of do not adapt to different network topologies, only apply to specific performance metric, and so on. In this paper, based on the architecture and routing characteristics of Internet, we propose a novel network path property estimation mechanism named NetGuru, which divides Internet into individual performance domains (PD) and maintains a performance server (PS) for each PD. NetGuru provides path performance estimation service to distributed applications through the collaboration of PSes in different PDs. Simulation result demonstrates that NetGuru can help improve P2P file transfer application efficiency.