Towards Application-Level Multi-Homing

Hundreds of millions of users are attracted to many of the thriving Internet applications and services, such as e-mail, online social networking, or video sharing. In an attempt to effectively serve the large number of users, the application providers started deploying their own application-specific network infrastructures. We demonstrate that the significant proliferation of applications and the growth of associated networking infrastructures creates a considerable application-induced diversity in end-to-end performance, measured in terms of the effective throughput. We conduct a large-scale measurement study in an attempt to quantify, understand, and utilize such application-driven network performance diversity. Moreover, we demonstrate that the observed end-to-end performance diversity can be effectively utilized in numerous networking contexts.