UKAIRO: Internet-Scale Bandwidth Detouring

The performance of content distribution on the Internet is crucial for many services. While popular content can be delivered efficiently to users by caching it using content delivery networks, the distribution of less popular content is often constrained by the bandwidth of the Internet path between the content server and the client. Neither can influence the selected path and therefore clients may have to download content along a path that is congested or has limited capacity. We describe UKAIRO, a system that reduces Internet download times by using detour paths with higher TCP throughput. UKAIRO first discovers detour paths among an overlay network of potential detour hosts and then transparently diverts HTTP connections via these hosts to improve the throughput of clients downloading from content servers. Our evaluation shows that by performing infrequent bandwidth measurements between 50 randomly selected PlanetLab hosts, UKAIRO can identify and exploit potential detour paths that increase the median bandwidth to public Internet web servers by up to 80%.