Internet Sibilla: Utilizing DNS for Delay Estimation Service

Abstract

Massively distributed applications are popular in today's Internet. To improve the end-user experience, they require constantly updated information about the network-internal performance characteristics, such as RTT, effective bandwidth, IP hop count, and loss rate. Knowledge of network-internal characteristics allow distributed applications to solve commonly encountered problems, such as nearest neighbor discovery, leader node selection, and optimal distribution tree organization. Today's Internet does not provide any such information, and applications and new services resort often perform their own measurement to obtain necessary information.