This paper describes a server selection mechanism for connection oriented services based on passive probing. The criterion of selection is the quality of service expected from each server, expressed as a function of availability and response time. Measures from previous connections to servers made by local clients are used to continuously update a QoS database which the prediction algorithm uses to compute the response time expected in subsequent connections. The forecasting approach is mainly

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... ased on prior measurements of TCP connection establishment time. The maximum segment size (MSS) in a connection is also considered. The proposed metric is compared with other ones normally used to measure network proximity. Results show that the proposed server selection mechanism achieves a reduction of response time of over 50% compared with a random selection mechanism.