A First Characterization of Anycast Traffic from Passive Traces .
Résumé
IP anycast routes packets to the topologically nearest
server according to BGP proximity. In the last years, new players
have started adopting this technology to serve web content via
Anycast-enabled CDNs (A-CDN). To the best of our knowledge,
in the literature, there are studies that focus on a specific A-CDN
deployment, but little is known about the users and the services
that A-CDNs are serving in the Internet at large.
This prompted us to perform a passive characterization study,
bringing out the principal A-CDN actors in our monitored setup,
the services they offer, their penetration, etc. Results show a
very heterogeneous picture, with A-CDN empowered services
that are very popular (e.g., Twitter or Bing), serve a lot of
different contents (e.g., Wordpress or adult content), and even
include audio/video streaming (e.g., Soundcloud, or Vine). Our
measurements show that the A-CDN technology is quite mature
and popular, with more than 50% of web users that access
content served by a A-CDN during peak time