On Wed, 15 Jul 2009, Randy Bush wrote:
The typical network architecture problem, what are the best (shortest
latency, greatest bandwidth, etc) locations to connect to the every
nation in the world? As you increase the number of locations, how do the
choices change?
If you only had small (2 3 5 7 11) number of locations, where would they
be?
And what data do you have to prove the choices are best?
it would help if you said how you measure 'best' or 'better'.
As I said in the original message, combination of minimizing latency
(smallest RTT to the most IP endpoints) and maximizing bandwidth (largest
number of bits per second successfully received at the most IP endpoints
in the smallest amount of time) from the locations identified as best.
On Wed, 15 Jul 2009, Jareon Masser wrote:
Depends completely on what the data is and why you want to send them
from A to B and if A and B are inside your network or not etc etc etc
etc.
As I said in the original message, every nation in the world. Or more
specifically the largest number of IP endpoints reachable in the most
nations from the locations chosen.
A = the few locations you pick
B = every other IP endpoint reachable from those locations
If every point B in the world is inside your network, awesome. But
highly unlikely.
More than likely to maximize reachability, minimize latency, the
highest goodput, and most availability will require some combination
starting locations and ISPs.
The data is IP applications in use now and in the future. Why do you want
to send them from A to B, because you never know what is going to happen
in the world and you want to be prepared for any point B to have the best
chance of being able to effectively communicate with the chosen points A.
On Wed, 15 Jul 2009, Bill Woodcock wrote:
However, if one wanted the beginnings of an answer, without nailing
down any of the specifics, merely looking at the quantity of routes
available at each IXP would let you know, on average, how many paths
there were on offer to each destination.
The starting locations aren't necessarily IXPs. They could be ISPs
with full transit connections at the chosen locations. But the goal
includes maximizing reachability to the world, which probably means a
full transit connection near many other ISPs would do better than a full
transit connection far away from many other ISPs.
As others have noted, this is a many-variables sort of problem, and to
answer it well requires nailing down a few of those variables
True, optimization and constraints solving is easier with fewer variables.
There are also researchers that seem to spend lots of time measuring
the Internet and collecting data for all sorts of reasons. When creating
graphs of the Internet, one of the basic problems every mapper has to
solve is deciding where are the "centers" of the map.
