Examining Lower Latency Routing with Overlay Networks

Abstract: In today's rapidly expanding digital landscape, where access to timely online content is paramount to users, the underlying network infrastructure and latency performance significantly influence the user experience. We present an empirical study of the current Internet's connectivity and the achievable latencies to propose better routing paths if available. Understanding the severity of the non-optimal internet topology with RIPE Atlas stats, we conduct practical experiments to demonstrate that local traffic from the San Diego area to the University of California, San Diego reaches up to Los Angeles before serving responses. We examine the traceroutes and build an experimental overlay network to constrain the San Diego traffic within the city to get better round-trip time latencies.