Reusing CDN Measurements

Borrowing the view of the network that content delivery networks already have.

Last updated on Aug 14, 2026 Research

Project Overview

Large content delivery networks spend enormous effort measuring the Internet. To decide which replica should serve a given client, a CDN continuously evaluates paths, load, and latency, and encodes the result in the redirection it hands back. Those redirections are public. Anybody who asks a CDN where to fetch an object gets a small piece of that network view for free.

This project started from the observation that the redirections are a signal in their own right, not just a mechanism for fetching content. If two clients are sent to the same replica at the same time, that says something about where they sit in the network relative to one another. If a client’s redirection changes, something about the path has changed. A CDN’s infrastructure, in other words, doubles as a measurement service with a global vantage point, updated continuously, at no cost to the person reading it — provided the signal can be interpreted correctly.

The work that followed ran that idea through three problems: finding better paths than the ones routing gives you, positioning hosts relative to each other, and choosing peers in a peer-to-peer system.

Detouring

Drafting Behind Akamai showed that CDN redirections can be used to find one-hop detours that beat the default path, without running any measurements of your own. A client watches which replicas a CDN steers it toward, infers path conditions from the pattern, and routes through a peer that the CDN’s own view suggests is well positioned.

SideStep took the same insight further, examining how effective reused measurements are as a substitute for dedicated probing, and packaging the result as a service. We also released DraFTP, an FTP suite built on SideStep, to show the improvement in an application people already used.

Positioning

Relative Network Positioning via CDN Redirections turned the signal toward a different question. Rather than asking which detour is fastest, it asked where hosts sit with respect to one another — using agreement between two clients' redirections as evidence of proximity. This gives a positioning system that needs no landmark infrastructure and no active probing, because the CDN has already done that work.

Peer Selection: Ono

Ono applied the idea where it mattered most commercially. BitTorrent clients pick peers largely at random, which generates enormous volumes of traffic that cross ISP boundaries — expensive for providers, and slower than necessary for users. The prevailing assumption was that these two interests were opposed, and that reducing cross-ISP traffic meant accepting worse performance.

Ono showed otherwise. By using CDN redirections to identify peers that were close in the network, it biased peer selection toward nearby peers, and both numbers improved: less traffic crossed ISP boundaries, and downloads got faster. This was the argument in Taming the Torrent, and it landed in the middle of an active dispute about ISPs throttling peer-to-peer traffic.

Ono shipped as a plugin for the Vuze/Azureus BitTorrent client, which put it in the hands of ordinary users rather than a testbed.

Software

  • Ono — a Vuze/Azureus plugin implementing CDN-based peer selection. Over 100,000 users; cut latency on selected paths by two orders of magnitude and raised download rates by up to 207%.
  • SideStep and DraFTP — detouring by reusing CDN measurements, plus an open-source FTP suite built on it. Improved performance more than half the time, and never made it worse.

Papers

Coverage

Ono was covered by Slashdot, El País, and the Chronicle of Higher Education in 2008.

People

This was a joint project with Aleksandar Kuzmanovic’s group at Northwestern.

Faculty

Students

Internet Measurement Content Delivery Peer-to-Peer Network Positioning
Authors: Ao-Jan Su , David R. Choffnes , Aleksandar Kuzmanovic , Fabián E. Bustamante