On Measuring the Geographic Diversity of Internet Routes

Abstract

Route diversity in networks is elemental for establishing reliable, high-capacity connections with appropriate security between endpoints. As for the Internet, route diversity has already been studied at both the autonomous system and router level topologies by means of graph theoretical disjoint paths. In this article we complement these approaches by proposing a method for measuring the diversity of Internet paths in a geographical sense. By leveraging the recent developments in IP geolocation we show how to map the paths discovered by traceroute into geographically equivalent classes. This allows us to identify the geographical footprints of the major transmission paths between end-hosts, and building on our observations, we propose a quantitative measure for geographical diversity of Internet routes between any two hosts.