Detecting Triangle Inequality Violations in Internet Coordinate Systems

Internet Coordinate Systems (ICS) have been proposed
as a method for estimating delays between hosts without
direct measurement. However, they can only be accurate when
the triangle inequality holds for Internet delays. Actually Triangle
Inequality Violations (TIVs) are frequent and are likely to remain
a property of the Internet due to routing policies or path inflation.
In this paper we propose methods to detect TIVs with high
confidence by observing various metrics such as the relative
estimation error on the coordinates. Indeed, the detection of
TIVs can be used for mitigating their impact on the ICS itself,
by excluding some disturbing nodes from clusters running their
own ICS, or more generally by improving their neighbor selection
mechanism.