Replacing Network Coordinate System with Internet Delay Matrix Service (IDMS): A Case Study in Chinese Internet

Network distance (Round Trip Time, RTT) is an important parameter for many Internet distributed systems to optimize their performances. Network Coordinate System (NCS) is assumed as a lightweight and scalable mechanism to predict network distance between any two Internet hosts without explicit measurements. Though many NCSes have been proposed in the literatures, they are not satisfactory in terms of accuracy. In this paper, we propose to use delay matrix to replace the NCS. This paper makes three contributions. First, we show that not all the hosts need an independent network coordinate (NC). On the contrary, most hosts can be represented as one or several nodes in NCS. Second, we present an Internet Delay Matrix Service (IDMS) for representing network distances without explicit measurements in Internet. Third, we describe two delay matrices—up-to-date delay matrix (UDM) and previous delay matrices (PDM)—for representing the network distances. Extensive simulations on our collected Chinese Internet data sets show that IDMS is an accurate, efficient, scalable and practical method for Chinese Internet. The performance of IDMS is better than other existing approaches.