Anycast, Inflation, and Efficiency in the Root DNS

[Future Sensors]

Anycast, Inflation, and Efficiency in the Root DNS​

Anycast is used to serve content including root DNS. However, prior work examining root DNS suggests anycast deployments incur significant inflation, with users often routed to suboptimal sites especially for larger deployments. These results are surprising, given the importance and growth of production anycast deployments. We reassess anycast performance -- using new methodology we show root DNS latency hardly matters to users because caching is so effective. We then show inflation in the root DNS is not as poor as previously thought, since recursives can preferentially query their best performing root letter. We conclude with a discussion of how deployment size relates to efficiency and latency, and present survey results from root DNS operators elucidating reasons for expansion of the root DNS. These results demonstrate the importance of context and coverage when measuring system performance.

Read more:

https://indico.dns-oarc.net/event/39/contributions/866/

Presentation Slides (PDF):

https://indico.dns-oarc.net/event/39/contributions/866/attachments/824/1487/v2 OARConline Workshop 35a Submission.pdf