Partitioning the internet using Anycast catchments

Abstract

In anycast deployments, knowing how traffic will be distributed among the locations is challenging. In this paper, we propose a technique for partitioning the Internet using passive measurements of existing anycast deployments such that all IP addresses within a partition are routed to the same location for an arbitrary anycast deployment. One IP address per partition may then represent the entire partition in subsequent measurements of specific anycast deployments. We implement a practical version of our technique and apply it to production traffic from an anycast authoritative DNS service of a major CDN and demonstrate that the resulting partitions have low error even up to 2 weeks after they are generated.