Global network positioning is a coordinates-based mechanism in a peer-to-peer

Peer-to-peer

Peer-to-peer computing or networking is a distributed application architecture that partitions tasks or workloads among peers. Peers are equally privileged, equipotent participants in the application...

 network architecture which predicts Internet

Internet

The Internet is a global system of interconnected computer networks that use the standard Internet protocol suite to serve billions of users worldwide...

 network distance (i.e. round-trip propagation and transmission delay). The mechanism is based on absolute coordinates computed from modeling the Internet as a geometric space. Since end hosts maintain their own coordinates, the approach allows end hosts to compute their inter-host distances as soon as they discover each other. Moreover, coordinates are very efficient in summarizing inter-host distances, making the approach very scalable.