Taming Anycast in a Wild Internet
In this study, we explore the operation and optimization of anycast networks through the lens of deployments that have a large number of upstream service providers. We demonstrate that these many-provider anycast networks exhibit fundamentally different properties when interacting with the Internet, having a greater number of single AS-hop paths, and reduced dependency on each provider, compared with few-provider networks. We further examine the impact of announcement configuration changes, demonstrating that in nearly 30% of vantage point groups, round-trip time performance can be improved by more than 25%, solely by manipulating which providers receive anycast announcements. Finally, we propose DailyCatch, an empirical measurement system for testing and validating announcement configuration changes, and demonstrate its ability to influence user- experienced performance on a global, anycast CDN.
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