On the real impact of path inflation in networks under production

Abstract

The research community has proved the existence and studied the root causes of Path Inflation on the Internet - end-to-end paths significantly longer than necessary. However, it has been typically ignored that the popularity of traffic destinations and, consequently, of network paths, is clearly heterogeneous - some destinations are popular while others are barely accessed. In this paper, we propose a trace-driven methodology to measure the Path Inflation accounting for the popularity of Internet destinations from a given network, thus evaluating the implications that Path Inflation exerts on real networks under production. This information is important for network operators because it allows them to objectively stand out those destinations whose connection analysis must be prioritized. The results of applying this methodology to the Spanish academic network show that the most critical regions to focus on are Spain's closest countries, which either are very popular or have large Path Inflation as a consequence of the use of transatlantic links as intermediate nodes, or both.