Macroscopic geographical speed of data transmission in European Internet

Abstract

The paper deals with the geographical speed of IP data transmission in the European Internet. We measure the geographical speed using a large set of PlanetLab servers with known physical location. Based on the results we propose a method to identify the maximum geographical distance that data can travel in Europe for given communication latency. A more accurate estimation of the geographical distance between the Internet nodes helps to improve location-aware Internet services and applications. We show that the method results in smaller delimited areas of possible node locations.