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An empirical evaluation of wide-area internet bottlenecks

Published: 27 October 2003 Publication History

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.

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cover image ACM Conferences
IMC '03: Proceedings of the 3rd ACM SIGCOMM conference on Internet measurement
October 2003
328 pages
ISBN:1581137737
DOI:10.1145/948205
Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for components of this work owned by others than ACM must be honored. Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, or republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. Request permissions from [email protected]

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Published: 27 October 2003

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IMC03: Internet Measurement Conference
October 27 - 29, 2003
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IMC '03 Paper Acceptance Rate 32 of 109 submissions, 29%;
Overall Acceptance Rate 277 of 1,083 submissions, 26%

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