Informed Detour Selection Helps Reliability

In this work we propose to use path information to improve the reliability of the Internet. Previous work put forth a simple idea of using an overlay network of intermediary detour nodes that can be used to route around failures on direct Internet paths. We provide the mechanism for choosing these intermediary nodes. The underlying idea of our work is that knowledge of the point-of-presence (PoP) path between the source and destination as well as the PoP paths between potential detour nodes and destination can be used to pick the intermediary for routing around failures on the direct path. We validate our proposal by performing an experiment using PlanetLab and leveraging the existing iPlane infrastructure. Using the data from iPlane, we obtain a two-fold decrease in path outage probability over the state- of-the-art.