A First Characterization of Anycast Traffic from Passive Traces

IP anycast routes packets to the topologically nearest server according to BGP proximity. In the last years, new players have started adopting this technology to serve web content via Anycast-enabled CDNs (A-CDN). To the best of our knowledge, in the literature, there are studies that focus on a specific A-CDN deployment, but little is known about the users and the services that A-CDNs are serving in the Internet at large. This prompted us to perform a passive characterization study, bringing out the principal A-CDN actors in our monitored setup, the services they offer, their penetration, etc. Results show a very heterogeneous picture, with A-CDN empowered services that are very popular (e.g., Twitter or Bing), serve a lot of different contents (e.g., Wordpress or adult content), and even include audio/video streaming (e.g., Soundcloud, or Vine). Our measurements show that the A-CDN technology is quite mature and popular, with more than 50% of web users that access content served by a A-CDN during peak time.