Strategies for Improving the Trustworthiness and Efficiency of Network Positioning Algorithms

As real-time interactive applications start embracing the service-oriented paradigm, it becomes increasingly important to locate services by proximity. One way to implement this is via network latency estimation using approaches such as network positioning. In this paper, we propose simple and practical strategies to improve the trustworthiness of network positioning schemes. In particular, our strategies make network positioning immune to non-random perturbations such as denial-of-service attacks and localized network congestion. Additionally, we studied the overhead generated by existing network positioning algorithms and propose an algorithm that results in low overhead while retaining very high accuracies. We performed extensive simulations and implementations on PlanetLab to examine the performance trade-offs.