Endpoint-Based Routing Strategies for Improving Internet Performance and Resilience

Internet access speeds of large enterprises and educational institutions have improved dramati-cally over the past few years. However, this higher-speed connectivity is still ineffective at providing end-users with good download performance and robustness from service interruptions. This arises due to the prevalence of constrained links with little spare capacity inside Internet Service Provider (ISP) networks. In this dissertation, we first investigate the location, latency and traffic load characteristics of network links that limit the Internet performance of well-connected end-networks. More impor-tantly, we show how end-networks can employ a clever Internet route selection technique, called Multihoming Route Control, to avoid these performance bottlenecks and obtain much better Inter-net performance. Using Internet-scale measurements conducted over Akamai’s content distribution infrastructure, we show that by multihoming to three ISPs, and intelligently scheduling transfers across the ISPs, an end-network could potentially improve its Internet round-trip times (RTTs), throughputs and reliability by up as much as 30%. We also compare the Internet performance and reliability from route control against more pow