Traveling Through a Network

This week's blog will focus on how information is transmitted throughout a network using various systems. I chose 3 separate websites, one based in the United States, one based in Australia, and one based in China. For each website, I ran the IP address using ping as well as traceroute. The following information are the results I found.

Pings:

For the google.com ping, a total of 10 packets were transmitted. A total of 10 packets were received and there was no time out during the transmission. The average round-trip for this pin was 22.214ms.

For the second ping, I chose a site from china. This ping also transmitted 10 pings and all of the pings were received successfully. In this ping, however, the average round trip time was quite a bit longer, having and average of 286.734 ms. I believe this is due to having to travel farther distances through many different routers and servers.

 The third website I chose to ping was a website from Australia. This ping went to panther.com.au. Like the others, 10 packets were transmitted on all 10 packets were received. Like the last ping that had to travel to China servers, this ping for an Australian website also had a longer average round trip time, which came out to be 286.734. 

Traceroutes:

This is the traceroute for google.com. On this traceroute, is took 8 hops to complete, though the second hop timed out. First it determines the IP address, sends the info through my home router and through my internet provider which is suddenlink, then attempts to contact the website servers to collect the information requested via the packets.

The following two traceroutes were similar to the first in that they all timed out on their second hop. This one timed out on it’s fifth hop as well. As this route was going to Australia, it took quite a few more hops. Whereas the last traceroute too 8 hops, this one took 19.

For this final traceroute we ventured all the way to china. This route, like the others timed out on the 2nd hop, however this one always timed out on the 15th and the 16th hop. Similar to the last route that went to Australia, this one also took longer than traceroutes with American based IP addresses.

After collecting and review the data from pings versus traceroutes, it is clear to me that depending on the geographical location of where you are trying to reach, the roundtrip time will likely increase, as well as the number of hops it takes to get there. This data can be used to determine problems in connection by being about to determine exactly where the packets are being lost, or exactly where the hops are being timed out. It can also be used to determine what routers take the longest amount of time and which ones are the fastest. Since all the packet information first has to go through your home router and then internet services provider, you can also use ping and traceroutes to determine if a problem with sending or receiving packets is on your end or not.