Imagine you have many clustered servers, across many hosts, in a heterogeneous network environment, such that the connections between servers may have wildly varying latencies and bandwidth. You want to build a map of the connections between servers my transferring data between them.

Of course, this map may become stale over time as the network topology changes - but lets ignore those complexities for now and assume the network is relatively static.

Given the latencies between nodes in this host graph, calculating the bandwidth is a relative simply timing exercise. I'm having more difficulty with the latencies - however. To get round-trip time, it is a simple matter of timing a return-trip ping from the local host to a remote host - both timing events (start, stop) occur on the local host.

What if I want one-way times under the assumption that the latency is not equal in both directions? Assuming that the clocks on the various hosts are not precisely synchronized (at least that their error is of the the same magnitude as the latencies involved) - how can I calculate the one-way latency?

In a related question - is this asymmetric latency (where a link is quicker in direction than the other) common in practice? For what reasons/hardware configurations? Certainly I'm aware of asymmetric bandwidth scenarios, especially on last-mile consumer links such as DSL and Cable, but I'm not so sure about latency.

Added: After considering the comment below, the second portion of the question is probably better off on serverfault.