On the Investigation of Path Preference in End-to-End Network Measurements

Overlay applications have used various tools to measure path properties in order to construct efficient overlay networks. Typical examples include delay measurement, connectivity measurement and residual bandwidth measurement. While different tools have different measurement targets, it is difficult to design general criterion for selecting paths to measure. In this paper, we study path properties and figure out some simple rules for path selection in measurements. We first examine the relationship between path delay and residual bandwidth. Our measurement results indicate that short paths often have high residual bandwidth. We then impose high preference on short paths in traceroute measurements. The results show that traceroute measurements with path preference achieve comparable inference efficiency and much lower overhead as compared to traditional traceroute measurements. Our study suggests that we can preferentially select short paths to measure. This can fulfill various requirements on path properties.