Measurements On Delay And Hop-Count Of The Internet

To nd out how big the Internet is, we measured the round-trip delays and hop-counts from a UCLA host computer to a randomly selected set of three thousand Internet hosts around the world. Our results show that over 90% of these hosts in continental US are within 18 hops from UCLA, and the round-trip delays to 90% of these hosts are less than 153ms. There seems no strong correlation between the delay and hop-count, although the average delay increases with hop-count. Measurements to international hosts show that the delay and hop-count strongly depend on the countries the hosts locate. Physical distances and link speeds are the most important factors that determine the round-trip delay.