On the accuracy of embeddings for internet coordinate systems

Internet coordinate systems embed Round-Trip-Times (RTTs) between Internet nodes into some geometric space so that unmeasured RTTs can be estimated using distance computation in that space. If accurate, such techniques would allow us to predict Internet RTTs without extensive measurements. The published techniques appear to work very well when accuracy is measured using metrics such as absolute relative error. Our main observation is that absolute relative error tells us very little about the quality of an embedding as experienced by a user. We define several new accuracy metrics that attempt to quantify various aspects of user-oriented quality. Evaluation of current Internet coordinate systems using our new metrics indicates that their quality is not as high as that suggested by the use of absolute relative error.