Computing network distance between two hosts

Question

I want to compute some metrics relative to the "distance" between two hosts on a network app. I came up with the following naïve solution inspired by ping.

1. Sending UDP packages of varying size.
2. Wait for a response of the other node.
3. Compute the time between send and recieve.
4. Normalize this data and compute my metrics over it.

I'd like to avoid managing raw sockets, but if that's a better option, please tell me.

Would you reccomend another solution?

EDIT:

I think I was not clear on this. I know what's TTL and traceroute and that's not what I am searching for.

What I am searching for is for a better metric that combine latency, bandwidth and yes, the traditional distance between hosts (because I think traceroute alone is not that useful for managing a protocol). That's the motivation of using ping-like measures.

Answer 1

The question becomes can you not modify the existing protocol or be more industrious and capture RTT details from existing request-reply messages?

If you modify the existing protocol, by say adding on transmission time stamp you can perform additional analytics server side. You might be able to still infer times if there is a request-reply from the server to the client.

The main idea being that adding additional messages explicitly for path latency measurement is often highly redundant and only serves to increase network chatter and complexity.

Answer 2

The definition of metrics you are looking for depends on the purpose of it - you can do it in many ways, and which way is the best always depends on the purpose.

In general, you are looking for some function distance(A, B). In general that would be a function of bandwidth and latency between A and B:

distance(A, B) = f(bandwidth(A, B), latency(A, B))

the shape of function f() would depend on the purpose, on the application - what you really need to optimize. The simplest would be to use linear function:

distance(A, B) = alpha * bandwidth + beta * latency

and again, the coefficients alpha and beta would depend on what you are trying to optimize. If you have measured some variable that measures your system performance, you can do statistical analysis (regression) to find optimal parameters:

performance(A, B) ~ alpha * bandwidth(A, B) + beta * latency(A, B)

Also be careful when you speak about metrics. Each metric must fulfil the following condition:

distance(A, B) + distance(B, C) >= distance(A, C)

Which is not always true in computer networks, as it depends on router decision.

Answer 3

IMHO it highly depends on specific details of your application.

• Some apps are more "delay" sensitive, while loosing some packets is accepted - like VOIP. Than you need to measure reponse time , with ignoring lost packets
• others needs fast reposes, (so "delay" sensitive), and lost packets need to be retransmitted, but data amount is low - than you need to measure, like you make it
  • depending how retransmitting impacts your app you have either to calculate : average , variance or other - let's it be d
  • depending if redundancy is acceptable, you can send each packet n times to reduce retransmission. Than make function d = f(n), and compare the functions.
• some applications need mostly speed, while delay might be very long (like hours). Than you might be interested on making "sliding window" statistic for given period of time, to know how much data where transferred during "last t minutes" and update value constantly.

There could be many manyo ther metrics, also including redundant connections between hosts when reliability is priority. So it highly depends on application.