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International Conference on Passive and Active Network Measurement

PAM 2017: Passive and Active Measurement pp 188–200Cite as

Anycast Latency: How Many Sites Are Enough?

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Part of the book series: Lecture Notes in Computer Science ((LNCCN,volume 10176))

Abstract

Anycast is widely used today to provide important services such as DNS and Content Delivery Networks (CDNs). An anycast service uses multiple sites to provide high availability, capacity and redundancy. BGP routing associates users to sites, defining the catchment that each site serves. Although prior work has studied how users associate with anycast services informally, in this paper we examine the key question how many anycast sites are needed to provide good latency, and the worst case latencies that specific deployments see. To answer this question, we first define the optimal performance that is possible, then explore how routing, specific anycast policies, and site location affect performance. We develop a new method capable of determining optimal performance and use it to study four real-world anycast services operated by different organizations: C-, F-, K-, and L-Root, each part of the Root DNS service. We measure their performance from more than 7,900 vantage points (VPs) worldwide using RIPE Atlas. (Given the VPs uneven geographic distribution, we evaluate and control for potential bias.) Our key results show that a few sites can provide performance nearly as good as many, and that geographic location and good connectivity have a far stronger effect on latency than having many sites. We show how often users see the closest anycast site, and how strongly routing policy affects site selection.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    The term anycast instance can refer to a site or to specific servers at a site. Because of this ambiguity we avoid that term in this paper.

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Acknowledgments

We thank Geoff Huston (APNIC), George Michaelson (APNIC), Ray Bellis (ISC),Cristian Hesselman (SIDN Labs), Benno Overeinder (NLnet Labs) and Jaap Akkerhuis (NLnet Labs), Duane Wessels (Verisign), Paul Vixie (Farsight), Romeo Zwart (RIPE NCC), Anand Buddhdev (RIPE NCC), and operators from C Root for their technical feedback.

This research uses measurements from RIPE Atlas, operated by RIPE NCC.

Ricardo Schmidt’s work is in the context of SAND (Self-managing Anycast Networks for the DNS: http://www.sand-project.nl) and DAS (DNS Anycast Security: http://www.das-project.nl) projects, sponsored by SIDN, NLnet Labs and SURFnet.

John Heidemann’s work is partially sponsored by the U.S. Dept. of Homeland Security (DHS) Science and Technology Directorate, HSARPA, Cyber Security Division, via SPAWAR Systems Center Pacific under Contract No. N66001-13-C-3001, and via BAA 11-01-RIKA and Air Force Research Laboratory, Information Directorate under agreement numbers FA8750-12-2-0344 and FA8750-15-2-0224. The U.S. Government is authorized to make reprints for Governmental purposes notwithstanding any copyright. The views contained herein are those of the authors and do not necessarily represent those of DHS or the U.S. Government.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. University of Twente, Enschede, The Netherlands

    Ricardo de Oliveira Schmidt & Jan Harm Kuipers

  2. USC/Information Sciences Institute, Marina Del Rey, USA

    John Heidemann

Authors
  1. Ricardo de Oliveira Schmidt
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  2. John Heidemann
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  3. Jan Harm Kuipers
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Corresponding author

Correspondence to Ricardo de Oliveira Schmidt .

Editor information

Editors and Affiliations

  1. CSIRO, Sydney, New South Wales, Australia

    Mohamed Ali Kaafar

  2. Queen Mary University of London, London, United Kingdom

    Steve Uhlig

  3. International Computer Science Institute, Berkeley, California, USA

    Johanna Amann

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de Oliveira Schmidt, R., Heidemann, J., Kuipers, J.H. (2017). Anycast Latency: How Many Sites Are Enough?. In: Kaafar, M., Uhlig, S., Amann, J. (eds) Passive and Active Measurement. PAM 2017. Lecture Notes in Computer Science(), vol 10176. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-54328-4_14

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-54328-4_14

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  • Print ISBN: 978-3-319-54327-7

  • Online ISBN: 978-3-319-54328-4

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