Turbo King: Framework for Large-Scale Internet Delay Measurements

Distance estimation and topological proximity in the Internet have recently emerged as important problems for many distributed applications [1], [10], [11], [19], [29], [31], [40], [41], [44]. Besides deploying tracers and using virtual coordinates, distance is often estimated using end-to-end methods such as King [13] that rely on the existing DNS infrastructure. However, the question of accuracy in such end-to-end estimation and its ability to produce a large-scale map of Internet delays has never been examined. We undertake this task below and show that King suffers from non-negligible error when DNS zones employ geographically diverse authoritative servers or utilize forwarders, both of which are very common in the existing Internet. We also show that King requires insertion of numerous unwanted DNS records in caches of remote servers (which is called cache pollution) and requires large traffic overhead when deployed in large-scale. To overcome these limitations, we propose a new framework we call Turbo King (T-King) that obtains end-to-end delay samples without bias in the presence of distant authoritative servers and forwarders, while consuming half the bandwidth needed by King and reducing the impact of cache pollution by several orders of magnitude. We finish the paper by evaluating Turbo King in several experiments.