MeTRO: Low Latency Network Paths with Routers-on-Demand

The current Internet is a loose federation of independent providers (ISPs) that manually manage inter-domain (ASes) route policies to primarily serve their own interests. The end-user experience may be hindered by two aspects: the ASes only optimize locally, possibly delivering sub-optimal end-to-end connections; the manual management of routing policies for a large amount of prefixes is error-prone. Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) clouds let users allocate compute resources on demand, at different geographical locations, while Internet connectivity is guaranteed. Therefore, cloud providers represent untapped resources for a better end-user (application) Internet connectivity experience.In this work we present MeTRO, a framework to construct better than best-effort routed Internet paths. Our method exploits the fact that cloud computer resources may host virtual routers and that one such router can be part of a path between two end systems. We perform an extensive evaluation of our method, by deploying it over 75 NLNOG Ring hosts. We show that our method, practically acting as an overlay network, decreases the latency in 58% of the cases studied, albeit increasing the number of hops. Our framework is specifically useful for monitoring and debugging failures, as well as configuration errors related to Internet reachability.