Circuitousness of Internet paths

In this section, we examine the nature of circuitous routes in the Internet. Since there is not a standard measure of circuitousness, we define a metric, distance ratio, as the ratio of the linearized distance of a path to the geographic distance between the source and destination of the path. The distance ratio reflects the degree to which the network path between two nodes deviates from the direct geographic path between the nodes. A ratio of 1 would indicate a perfect match (i.e., an absolutely direct route) while a large ratio would indicate a circuitous path. We present several different analysis with a view to studying the impact of spatial factors as well as temporal factors. Under spatial factors, we study the effect of the geographic and network locations of end-hosts on the circuitousness of paths. To study temporal properties, we compare the circuitousness of paths drawn from Paxson's 1995 data set to the ones drawn from our 2000 data set. Finally, we analyze the relationship between the minimum delay between two end-hosts and the linearized distance along their path.