The Internet is becoming an increasingly important component of modern day communication and information exchange. Yet, the applications which use the Internet in general do not have much information about the underlying path(s) from the source to the destination far less the characteristics of the paths. The layering concept has isolated applications from the network related information with the result that network applications such as FTP, WWW, Mirroring etc. are presently operated with little or no knowledge about the routes and their characteristics. It is clear that these applications could operate more efficiently if the routes and their characteristics are known and/or are made available to the concerned application.