Characterizing IPv4 anycast adoption and deployment

Abstract

This paper provides a comprehensive picture of IP-layer anycast adoption in the current Internet. We carry on multiple IPv4 anycast censuses, relying on latency measurement from PlanetLab. Next, we leverage our novel technique for anycast detection, enumeration, and geolocation [17] to quantify anycast adoption in the Internet. Our technique is scalable and, unlike previous efforts that are bound to exploiting DNS, is protocol-agnostic. Our results show that major Internet companies (including tier-1 ISPs, over-the-top operators, Cloud providers and equipment vendors) use anycast: we find that a broad range of TCP services are offered over anycast, the most popular of which include HTTP and HTTPS by anycast CDNs that serve websites from the top-100k Alexa list. Additionally, we complement our characterization of IPv4 anycast with a description of the challenges we faced to collect and analyze large-scale delay measurements, and the lessons learned.