Examining Lower Latency Routing with Overlay Networks

TL;DR

This paper investigates how overlay networks can reduce latency by rerouting local traffic within cities, demonstrating potential improvements over the existing internet topology through empirical experiments.

Contribution

It provides an empirical analysis of internet latency issues and proposes overlay network strategies to optimize local routing paths for lower latency.

Findings

Local traffic to UCSD reaches LA before responses

Overlay networks can improve round-trip times

Empirical data supports overlay routing benefits

Abstract

In today's rapidly expanding digital landscape, where access to timely online content is paramount to users, the underlying network infrastructure and latency performance significantly influence the user experience. We present an empirical study of the current Internet's connectivity and the achievable latencies to propose better routing paths if available. Understanding the severity of the non-optimal internet topology with RIPE Atlas stats, we conduct practical experiments to demonstrate that local traffic from the San Diego area to the University of California, San Diego reaches up to Los Angeles before serving responses. We examine the traceroutes and build an experimental overlay network to constrain the San Diego traffic within the city to get better round-trip time latencies.