A Fistful of Pings: Accurate and Lightweight Anycast Enumeration and Geolocation
Résumé
Use of IP-layer anycast 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, the measurement
techniques for discovering anycast replicas have been designed
around DNS, limiting 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. This is precisely the aim
of this paper, which proposes a new method for exhaustive
and accurate enumeration and city-level geolocation of anycast
instances, requiring only a handful of latency measurements
from a set of known vantage points. Our method exploits an
iterative workflow that enumerates (an optimization problem)
and geolocates (a classification problem) anycast replicas.
We thoroughly validate our methodology on available ground
truth (several DNS root servers), using multiple measurement
infrastructures (PlanetLab, RIPE), obtaining extremely accurate
results (even with simple algorithms, that we compare with
the global optimum), that we make available to the scientific
community. Compared to the state of the art work that appeared
in INFOCOM 2013 and IMC 2013, our technique (i) is not bound
to a specific protocol, (ii) requires 1000 times fewer vantage
points, not only (iii) achieves over 50% recall but also (iv)
accurately identifies the city-level geolocation for over 78% of
the enumerated servers, with (v) a mean geolocation error of
361 km for all enumerated servers.