Aditya Akella
ABSTRACT
Conventional wisdom has been that the performance limitations in the current Internet lie at the edges of the network -- i.e last mile connectivity to users, or access links of stub ASes. As these links are upgraded, however, it is important to consider where new bottlenecks and hot-spots are likely to arise. In this paper, we address this question through an investigation of non-access bottlenecks. These are links within carrier ISPs or between neighboring carriers that could potentially constrain the bandwidth available to long-lived TCP flows. Through an extensive measurement study, we discover, classify, and characterize bottleneck links (primarily in the U.S.) in terms of their location, latency, and available capacity.We find that about 50% of the Internet paths explored have a non-access bottleneck with available capacity less than 50 Mbps, many of which limit the performance of well-connected nodes on the Internet today. Surprisingly, the bottlenecks identified are roughly equally split between intra-ISP links and peering links between ISPs. Also, we find that low-latency links, both intra-ISP and peering, have a significant likelihood of constraining available bandwidth. Finally, we discuss the implications of our findings on related issues such as choosing an access provider and optimizing routes through the network. We believe that these results could be valuable in guiding the design of future network services, such as overlay routing, in terms of which links or paths to avoid (and how to avoid them) in order to improve performance.
- D. Andersen, H. Balakrishnan, M. Kaashoek, and R. Morris. Resilient Overlay Networks. In Proceedings of the 18th Symposium on Operating System Principles, Banff, Canada, October 2001. Google Scholar
Digital Library
- H. Balakrishnan, S. Seshan, M. Stemm, and R. H. Katz. Analyzing stability in wide-area network performance. In Proceedings of ACM SIGMETRICS, Seattle, WA, June 1997. Google ScholarDigital Library
- L.S.Brakmo,S.W.O'Malley,andL.L.Peterson. TCP Vegas: New Techniques for Congestion Detection and Avoidance. In Proceedings of the SIGCOMM '94 Symposium on Communications Architectures and Protocols, August 1994. Google ScholarDigital Library
- T. Bu, N. Duffield, F. L. Presti, and D. Towsley. Network tomography on general topologies. In Proceedings of ACM SIGMETRICS, Marina Del Ray, CA, June 2002. Google ScholarDigital Library
- R. L. Carter and M. E. Crovella. Measuring bottleneck link speed in packet-switched networks. Performance Evaluation, 27-28:297--318, October 1996. Google ScholarDigital Library
- Cooperative Association for Internet Data Analysis (CAIDA). Internet tools taxonomy. http://www.caida.org/tools/taxonomy/, October 2002.Google Scholar
- A. Downey. Using pathchar to estimate internet link characteristics. In Proceedings of ACM SIGCOMM, Cambridge, MA, August 1999. Google ScholarDigital Library
- L. Gao. On inferring autonomous system relationships in the Internet. IEEE/ACM Transactions on Networking, 9(6), December 2001. Google ScholarDigital Library
- R. Govindan and V. Paxson. Estimating router ICMP generation delays. In Proceedings of Passive and Active Measurement Workshop (PAM), Fort Collins, CO, 2002.Google Scholar
- J. Guojun, G. Yang, B. R. Crowley, and D. A. Agarwal. Network characterization service (NCS). In Proceedings of IEEE International Symposium on High Performance Distributed Computing (HPDC), San Francisco, CA, August 2001. Google ScholarDigital Library
- U. Hengartner, S. Moon, R. Mortier, and C. Diot. Detection and analysis of routing loops in packet traces. In Proceedings of ACM SIGCOMM Internet Measurement Workshop (IMW), November 2002. Google ScholarDigital Library
- V. Jacobson. pathchar - A Tool to Infer Characteristics of Internet Paths. ftp://ee.lbl.gov/pathchar/, 1997.Google Scholar
- M. Jain and C. Dovrolis. End-to-end available bandwidth: Measurement methodology, dynamics, and relation with TCP throughput. In Proceedings of ACM SIGCOMM, Pittsburgh, PA, August 2002. Google ScholarDigital Library
- M. Jain and C. Dovrolis. Pathload: A measurement tool for end-to-end available bandwidth. In Proceedings of Passive and Active Measurement Workshop (PAM), Fort Collins, CO, March 2002.Google Scholar
- S. Jaiswal, G. Iannaccone, C. Diot, J. Kurose, and D. Towsley. Measurement and classification of out-of-sequence packets in a tier-1 IP backbone. In Proceedings of ACM SIGCOMM Internet Measurement Workshop (IMW), November 2002. Google ScholarDigital Library
- C. Labovitz, A. Ahuja, and F. Jahanian. Experimental study of Internet stability and backbone failures. In Proceedings of IEEE International Symposium on Fault-Tolerant Computing (FTCS), Madison, WI, June 1999. Google ScholarDigital Library
- K. Lai and M. Baker. Nettimer: A tool for measuring bottleneck link bandwidth. In Proceedings of USENIX Symposium on Internet Technologies and Systems, March 2001. Google ScholarDigital Library
- B. A. Mah. pchar: A tool for measuring internet path characteristics. http://www.employees.org/~bmah/Software/pchar/, June 2000.Google Scholar
- A. P. Markopoulou, F. A. Tobagi, and M. J. Karam. Assessment of VoIP quality over Internet backbones. In Proceedings of IEEE INFOCOM'02, New York, NY, June 2002.Google ScholarCross Ref
- M. Mathis and J. Mahdavi. Diagnosing Internet Congestion with a Transport Layer Performance Tool . In Proc. INET '96, Montreal, Canada, June 1996. http://www.isoc.org/inet96/proceedings/.Google Scholar
- Network Characterization Service: Netest and Pipechar. http://www-didc.lbl.gov/pipechar, 1999.Google Scholar
- ns-2 Network Simulator. http://www.isi.edu/nsnam/ns/, 2000.Google Scholar
- V. Paxson. End-to-end internet packet dynamics. Proceedings of the SIGCOMM '97 Symposium on Communications Architectures and Protocols, pages 139--152, September 1997. Google ScholarDigital Library
- V. Paxson. End-to-end routing behavior in the internet. IEEE/ACM Transactions on Networking, 5(5):601--615, October 1997. Google ScholarDigital Library
- V. Paxson, A. Adams, and M. Mathis. Experiences with NIMI. In Proceedings of Passive and Active Measurement Workshop (PAM), Hamilton, New Zealand, April 2000.Google Scholar
- PlanetLab. http://www.planet-lab.org, 2002.Google Scholar
- RADB whois Server. whois.radb.net.Google Scholar
- RIPE whois Service. whois.ripe.net.Google Scholar
- BGP Tables from the University of Oregon RouteViews Project. http://moat.nlanr.net/AS/data.Google Scholar
- University of Oregon, RouteViews Project. http://www.routeviews.org.Google Scholar
- S. Savage, T. Anderson, A. Aggarwal, D. Becker, N. Cardwell, A. Collins, E. Hoffman, J. Snell, A. Vahdat, J. Voelker, and J. Zahorjan. Detour: a case for informed internet routing and transport. IEEE Micro, volume 19 no. 1:50--59, January 1999. Google ScholarDigital Library
- S. Savage, A. Collins, E. Hoffman, J. Snell, and T. Anderson. The end-to-end effects of internet path selection. In Proceedings of the SIGCOMM '99 Symposium on Communications Architectures and Protocols, pages 289--299, 1999. Google ScholarDigital Library
- L. Subramanian, S. Agarwal, J. Rexford, and R. H. Katz. Characterizing the Internet hierarchy from multiple vantage points. In Proceedings of IEEE INFOCOM, June 2002.Google ScholarCross Ref
- Traceroute.org. http://www.traceroute.org.Google Scholar
- Y. Zhang, L. Breslau, V. Paxson, and S. Shenker. On the characteristics and origins of Internet flow rates. In Proceedings of ACM SIGCOMM, Pittsburgh, PA, August 2002. Google ScholarDigital Library
- Y. Zhang, N. Duffield, V. Paxson, and S. Shenker. On the constancy of Internet path properties. In Proceedings of ACM SIGCOMM Internet Measurement Workshop (IMW), November 2001. Google ScholarDigital Library
- Y. Zhang, V. Paxson, and S. Shenker. The stationarity of internet path properties: Routing, loss, and throughput. Technical report, ICSI Center for Internet Research, May 2000.Google Scholar
Index Terms
- An empirical evaluation of wide-area internet bottlenecks
Recommendations
Locating internet bottlenecks: algorithms, measurements, and implications
The ability to locate network bottlenecks along end-to-end paths on the Internet is of great interest to both network operators and researchers. For example, knowing where bottleneck links are, network operators can apply traffic engineering either at ...
An empirical evaluation of wide-area internet bottlenecks
Performance limitations in the current Internet are thought to lie at the edges of the network -- i.e last mile connectivity to users, or access links of stub ASes. As these links are upgraded, however, it is important to consider where new bottlenecks ...
Enhancing TCP performance in wide-area cellular wireless networks: transport level approaches
Wireless communications systems and networksInternet technology-based architectures and protocols for supporting multimedia traffic over wireless networks are evolving. Since TCP (Transmission Control Protocol)/IP (Internet Protocol) is the standard network protocol stack on the Internet, its use ...
Comments