General Terms Measurement

Abstract Time-varying congestion on Internet paths and failures due to soft-ware, hardware, and configuration errors often disrupt packet delivery on the Internet. Many aproaches to avoiding these problems usemultiple paths between two network locations. These approaches rely on a path-independence assumption in order to work well; i.e.,they work best when the problems on different paths between two locations are uncorrelated in time. This paper examines the extent to which this assumption holdson the Internet by analyzing 14 days of data collected from 30 nodes in the RON testbed. We examine two problems that mani-fest themselves--congestion-triggered loss and path failures--and find that the chances of losing two packets between the same hostsis nearly as high when those packets are sent through an intermediate node (60%) as when they are sent back-to-back on the samepath (70%). In so doing, we also compare two different ways of taking advantage of path redundancy proposed in the literature: meshrouting based on packet replication, and reactive routing based on adaptive path selection. Categories and Subject Descriptors C.2.5 [Computer-Communication Networks]: Local and Wide-Area Networks--Interne