LACHESIS: A Tool for Benchmarking Internet Service Providers
Jeff Sedayao and Kotaro Akita
Intel Corporation
Abstract
Internet access is increasingly critical to organizations and
individuals [1]. With the current boom in Internet Service Providers
(ISPs), how does one judge one vendor from another? LACHESIS* is a
tool that provides a way to benchmark ISPs. LACHESIS takes a list of
prominent Internet Landmarks and determines the packet loss and
network latency involved in reaching those landmarks. Throughput was
rejected as a factor. Several studies indicate that network latency
is a critical factor in World Wide Web (WWW) performance [2-5]. The
default set of LACHESIS landmarks (landmarks used are customizable)
includes the Domain Name Service (DNS) root servers, well known FTP
servers, and popular WWW servers. LACHESIS is implemented as a PERL
script wrapped around FPING. The LACHESIS tool encourages ISPs to
have good interconnectivity with other ISPs. It also encourages ISPs
to have plenty of capacity and not to drop packets. LACHESIS has the
potential to swamp landmarks with ICMP packets (used by FPING), but
this can be dealt with by filtering out ICMP from abusive hosts. ISPs
can cheat by favoring ICMP packets. Future plans include a Winsock
implementation so that individual SLIP/ PPP Internet subscribers can
run their own benchmarks.
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