The performance of content distribution on the Internet is
crucial for many services. While popular content can be
delivered efficiently to users by caching it using content
delivery networks, the distribution of less popular content
is often constrained by the bandwidth of the Internet
path between the content server and the client. Neither
can influence the selected path and therefore clients may
have to download content along a path that is congested
or has limited capacity.
We describe UKAIRO, a system that reduces Internet
download times by using detour paths with higher TCP
throughput. UKAIRO first discovers detour paths among
an overlay network of potential detour hosts and then
transparently diverts HTTP connections via these hosts
to improve the throughput of clients downloading from
content servers. Our evaluation shows that by performing
infrequent bandwidth measurements between 50 randomly
selected PlanetLab hosts, UKAIRO can identify
and exploit potential detour paths that increase the median
bandwidth to public Internet web servers by up
to 80%.