Characterizing Internet Performance to Support Wide-area Application Development

To help in our wide-area application development, we have done an informal study of the relation between wide-area latency, the number of routers, and geographical distance between Internet sites. We did this by performing ping and traceroute measurements between 19 sites distributed across the globe. Contrary to our expectation there is almost no correlation between distance, latency, and number of routers in the current Internet. To help further studies of these characteristics the problems of this pilot project are also described.