Anycast

Description

Use of anycast IP addresses has increased in the last few years: once relegated to DNS root and top-level domain servers, anycast is now commonly used to assist distribution of general purpose content by CDN providers. Yet, most anycast discovery methodologies rely so far on DNS, which limits their usefulness to this particular service. This raises the need for protocol agnostic methodologies, that should additionally be as lightweight as possible in order to scale up anycast service discovery.

Our anycast discovery method allows for exhaustive and accurate enumeration and city-level geolocation of anycast replicas, with the constraints of only leverages a handful of latency measurements from a set of known probes. The method  is simple yet effective and maximizes recall by exploiting an iterative workflow to enumerate replicas (via optimization problem), while maximizing accuracy in the anycast instances geolocation despite latency noise (via classification problem).

New features supported by the mPlane project

The Anycast tool suite was entirely developed during the mPlane project. So thanks, mPlane!

Quick start

Installation and usage

For installation and usage of Anycast, see GitHub.  

Integration into an mPlane environment

Anycast tools comes with a native mPlane interface, exporting detection, enumeration and geolocation functions as separate capabilities.  Examples are available at GitHub.

References

Links to sources, binaries

Latest version is available at GitHub.

Links to additional documentation

Results of a world-wide IPv4 census measurement campaign are available for browsing at http://www.telecom-paristech.fr/~drossi/anycast