Verfploeter: Broad and Load-Aware Anycast Mapping

de Vries, Wouter B. and de O. Schmidt, Ricardo and Hardaker, Wes and Heidemann, John and de Boer, Pieter-Tjerk and Pras, Aiko
USC/Information Sciences Institute

citation

Wouter B. de Vries, Ricardo de O. Schmidt, Wes Hardaker, John Heidemann, Pieter-Tjerk de Boer and Aiko Pras 2017. Verfploeter: Broad and Load-Aware Anycast Mapping. Proceedings of the ACM Internet Measurement Conference (London, UK, 2017), 477–488. [DOI] [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 anycast 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 passive 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 deployment for B-Root, and we also report its use of a nine-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.

reference

@inproceedings{Vries17b,
  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},
  booktitle = {Proceedings of the ACM Internet Measurement Conference},
  pages = {477--488},
  year = {2017},
  sortdate = {2017-11-02},
  project = {ant, lacrend, lander, retrofuturebridge, nipet},
  jsubject = {network_security},
  address = {London, UK},
  myorganization = {USC/Information Sciences Institute},
  copyrightholder = {ACM},
  copyrightterms = {
  Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work
  for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that
  copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage
  and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first
  page. To copy otherwise, to republish, to post on servers or to
  redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a
  fee.
  },
  url = {https://ant.isi.edu/%7ejohnh/PAPERS/Vries17b.html},
  pdfurl = {https://ant.isi.edu/%7ejohnh/PAPERS/Vries17b.pdf},
  blogurl = {https://ant.isi.edu/blog/?p=1078},
  doi = {https://doi.org/10.1145/3131365.3131371},
  otherurl = {https://conferences.sigcomm.org/imc/2017/papers/imc17-final46.pdf},
  dataseturl = {https://ant.isi.edu/datasets/anycast/index.html#verfploeter}
}

copyright

Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. To copy otherwise, to republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee.