Title
Two days in the life of the DNS anycast root servers
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.
Year
DOI
Venue
2007
10.1007/978-3-540-71617-4_13
PAM
Keywords
Field
DocType
dns service,anycast instance,localize dns traffic,k root nameservers,dns root,dns anycast root server,dns traffic,anycast dns service,local instance,root instance,anycast root
Psychological resilience,Population,Computer science,Computer security,Computer network,Root name server,Border Gateway Protocol,Anycast,The Internet
Conference
Volume
ISSN
Citations 
4427
0302-9743
22
PageRank 
References 
Authors
1.32
6
5
Name
Order
Citations
PageRank
Ziqian Liu1405.00
Bradley Huffaker264654.28
Marina Fomenkov369353.64
Nevil Brownlee426028.08
Kc Claffy51905115.64