[e2e] ICMP Proxy Echo Accelerator

[Jon Crowcroft]

In missive <20030811143006.51078ec4.ggm at apnic.net>, George Michaelson typed:

 >>
 >>Thinkin about ICMP ping filter rules in firewalls, has anyone considered
 >>the advantages of deploying ICMP Echo Accelerators in the Internet today?
 >>
 >>-George
 >>
Frankly I am amazed no-one has had this idea before. Its clear ICMP was
never end2end anyhow since it is answered by the kernel and often
systems send you answers you didnt ask for, or the answer comes back
from a half way point - it is time we legitamized this practice and
implemented a full system of ICMP Echo Response proxies. The advantages
to the ISPs of having lower ping times, and for many systems trying to
be TCP friendly  or trying to build Internet COordinate Systems
using PING as the primary measure of latency would be immense. In fact,
we could use planetlab to implement a global system of ping proxies so
that everyone could get a fair response time.

if people are worried about the accuracy of the responses, let me just
point at the accuracy of web caches - actually, we could put cached
response times into the DNS, then when you ping a hostname, a lot of the time,
the answer would be in the local nameserver cache and you wouldnt even
have to bothe the ICMP accelerator - like 2 level memory caches in
modern processors

great idea!

 cheers

   jon