On the treeness of internet latency and bandwidth

Abstract

Existing empirical studies of Internet structure and path properties indicate that the Internet is tree-like. This work quantifies the degree to which at least two important Internet measures--latency and bandwidth--approximate tree metrics. We evaluate our ability to model end-to-end measures using tree embeddings by actually building tree representations. In addition to being simple and intuitive models, these trees provide a range of commonly-required functionality beyond serving as an analytical tool. The contributions of our study are twofold. First, we investigate the ability to portray the inherent hierarchical structure of the Internet using the most pure and compact topology, trees. Second, we evaluate the ability of our compact representation to facilitate many natural tasks, such as the selection of servers with short latency or high bandwidth from a client. Experiments show that these tasks can be done with high degree of success and modest overhead.