John Heidemann / Papers / Verfploeter: Broad and Load-Aware Anycast Mapping

Verfploeter: Broad and Load-Aware Anycast Mapping
Wouter B
USC/Information Sciences Institute

Citation

Wouter B. de Vries, Ricardo de O. Schmidt, Wes Hardaker, John Heidemann, Pieter-Tjerk de Boer and Aiko Pras. Verfploeter: Broad and Load-Aware Anycast Mapping. Technical Report ISI-TR-719. USC/Information Sciences Institute. [PDF] [alt PDF] [Dataset]

Abstract

IP anycast provides DNS operators and CDNs with automatic fail-over and reduced latency by breaking the Internet into catchments, each served by a different anycast site. Unfortunately, understanding and predicting changes to catchments as sites are added or removed has been challenging. Current tools such as RIPE Atlas or commercial equivalents map from thousands of vantage points (VPs), but their coverage can be inconsistent around the globe. This paper proposes Verfploeter, a new method that maps anycast catchments using active probing. Verfploeter provides around 3.8M virtual VPs, 430\times the 9k physical VPs in RIPE Atlas, providing coverage of the vast majority of networks around the globe. We then add load information from prior service logs to provide calibrated predictions of anycast changes. Verfploeter has been used to evaluate the new anycast for B-Root, and we also report its use of a 9-site anycast testbed. We show that the greater coverage made possible by Verfploeter’s active probing is necessary to see routing differences in regions that have sparse coverage from RIPE Atlas, like South America and China.

Bibtex Citation

@techreport{Vries17a,
  author = {de Vries, Wouter B. and de O. Schmidt, Ricardo and Hardaker, Wes and Heidemann, John and de Boer, Pieter-Tjerk and Pras, Aiko},
  title = {Verfploeter: Broad and Load-Aware Anycast Mapping},
  institution = {USC/Information Sciences Institute},
  year = {2017},
  sortdate = {2017-05-24},
  number = {ISI-TR-719},
  project = {ant, lacrend, lander, retrofuturebridge, nipet},
  jsubject = {network_security},
  month = may,
  jlocation = {johnh: pafile},
  keywords = {anycast, dns, root dns},
  url = {https://ant.isi.edu/%7ejohnh/PAPERS/Vries17a.html},
  pdfurl = {https://ant.isi.edu/%7ejohnh/PAPERS/Vries17a.pdf},
  blogurl = {https://ant.isi.edu/blog/?p=1039},
  dataseturl = {https://ant.isi.edu/datasets/anycast/index.html#verfploeter},
  myorganization = {USC/Information Sciences Institute},
  copyrightholder = {authors}
}
Copyright © by John Heidemann