An experimental study for path length effects on the similarity of network nodes based on RTT

Understanding the relationship of the latency among network nodes is important to cope with the problems of network measurements. There are some researches touched on this point but seldom explicit studies. In this paper, we study the similarity of the network nodes based on RTT. And have some new conclusion mainly: Similarity between two nodes will change little when just make the short of the two private path lengths much shorter. Also, similarity will very close to each other when their path ratios, which are the ratios of the common path lengths to the long private path lengths, keep the same. Then, we found that similarity is the same mutational trends with path ratio within a certain load combination. At last, we point out which path ratios mean the strong similarity between the two nodes and which correspond to the weak correlation.