Two days in the life of the DNS anycast root servers

Authors:
Ziqian Liu;Bradley Huffaker;Marina Fomenkov;Nevil Brownlee;Kc Claffy
Affiliations:
CAIDA and Beijing Jiaotong University;CAIDA, University of California at San Diego;CAIDA, University of California at San Diego;CAIDA and The University of Auckland;CAIDA, University of California at San Diego
Venue:
PAM'07 Proceedings of the 8th international conference on Passive and active network measurement
Year:
2007

Citing 3
Cited 3

An investigation of geographic mapping techniques for internet hosts

Proceedings of the 2001 conference on Applications, technologies, architectures, and protocols for computer communications
The causes of path inflation

Proceedings of the 2003 conference on Applications, technologies, architectures, and protocols for computer communications
On the use of anycast in DNS

SIGMETRICS '05 Proceedings of the 2005 ACM SIGMETRICS international conference on Measurement and modeling of computer systems

A day at the root of the internet

ACM SIGCOMM Computer Communication Review
DNS measurements at the .CN TLD servers

FSKD'09 Proceedings of the 6th international conference on Fuzzy systems and knowledge discovery - Volume 7
Understanding and preparing for DNS evolution

TMA'10 Proceedings of the Second international conference on Traffic Monitoring and Analysis

Quantified Score

Hi-index	0.00

Visualization

Abstract

The DNS root nameservers routinely use anycast in order to improve their service to clients and increase their resilience against various types of failures. We study DNS traffic collected over a two-day period in January 2006 at anycast instances for the C, F and K root nameservers. We analyze how anycast DNS service affects the worldwide population of Internet users. To determine whether clients actually use the instance closest to them, we examine client locations for each root instance, and the geographic distances between a server and its clients. We find that frequently the choice, which is entirely determined by BGP routing, is not the geographically closest one. We also consider specific AS paths and investigate some cases where local instances have a higher than usual proportion of non-local clients. We conclude that overall, anycast roots significantly localize DNS traffic, thereby improving DNS service to clients worldwide.