Papers for

internet infrastructure analysts

Papers whose findings have a practical use for this group, as judged from the abstract. Open a paper to read what it means in practice.

Comparing methods to find and map anycast server locations

Locating and Enumerating Anycast: a Comparison of Two Approaches

Abstract: Anycast allows for providing services from multiple, geographically distant Points of Presence (PoPs), using a single IP address, to, e.g., improve resilience. Due to its opaqueness, it is often unknown which addresses are provisioned using anycast and, if so, where the PoPs are located. As anycast is widely used for critical Internet infrastructures (e.g., the DNS) efforts have been made to map anycast deployments. The current state-of-the-art mapping technique, iGreedy, relies on latency-based measurements, and is adversely affected by noise caused by, e.g., network processing delays. Previous work has shown that traceroute can alternatively be used to detect anycast. As traceroute reveals the hops a packet traverses, it may also be used to locate sites using geolocation data for hops near the anycast PoPs. This paper is the first to assess the performance of the traceroute-based approach at scale, by targeting 14k prefixes from an anycast census. Using ground truth we show traceroute achieves a slight increase in enumeration and geolocation precision over iGreedy. However, it suffers from overestimating the number of PoPs and incurs a 4 times increase in probing cost, making it unattractive for anycast censuses.

Fri 18 SeptNetworking and Internet Architecture
The gist
Anycast lets internet services run from many places using one address, but it's hard to tell where these places are. The authors compare two ways to find and map anycast sites: one uses delays in network response times, and the other traces the route packets take. They find that tracing routes is a bit more precise for counting and locating sites but costs more in terms of network checks and sometimes guesses too many sites. This work helps in understanding the strengths and weaknesses of methods used to map important internet infrastructure.
Open → 2609.21292v1