[CSC2231] Paper Review: King: Estimating Latency between Arbitrary Internet End Hosts

King is a tool that approximates the latency between two hosts by
measuring the latency between the two name servers that are close to
these hosts using recursive DNS queries. Although this technique depends
on the proximity between the name servers and the hosts and whether the
name servers cooperate to handle recursive DNS queries, the authors'
experience with King shows that this technique is generally applicable
and achieves accurate results that are close to the traceroute estimates.

Now that researchers start to use various protocols not for their
original purpose. This may or may not be a good sign. The issue is that
there is no way to differentiate the measurement traffic from normal
traffic. On one hand, this allows the measurement traffic to sneak
through network filters, such as firewalls, to measure network
performance in places where ICMP packets cannot pass through. On the
other hand, when these measurement traffic starts to overwhelm the
network, there is no way to identify and filter them from causing severe
network degradation problem because there is no tag to tell the
measurement traffic are of low priority. Perhaps having a priority field
in all transport layer protocol will help so that network filters can
follow some policies specifying when to reject or accept these low
priority traffic.
Received on Thu Nov 03 2005 - 10:07:36 EST