Synthetic Coordinates for Disjoint Multipath Routing over the Internet

We address the problem of routing packets on multiple, router-disjoint, paths in the Internet using large-scale overlay networks. Multipath routing can improve Internet QoS, by routing around congestions. This can benefit interactive and other real-time applications. One of the main problems with practically achieving router-disjoint multipath routing is the scalability limitation on the number of participating nodes in such an overlay network, caused by the large number of (expensive) topology probes required to discover relay nodes that provide high router-level path disjointness. To address this problem, we propose a novel, synthetic coordinates-based approach. We evaluate our method against alternative strategies for finding router-level disjoint alternative paths. Additionally, we empirically evaluate the distribution of path diversity in the Internet.