Distributed Service Provisioning Using Stateful Anycast Communications

Notwithstanding IP anycast's introduction in Internet standards dates back to 1993 and its more recent adoption in IPv6 standards, its use in production environments is limited to date. This is mainly because native IP anycast lacks routing scalability and does not support session-based communications, thereby limiting its applicability to single request-response services such as DNS. For this reason, we propose a transparent anycast overlay architecture that retains the strengths of native anycast and neutralizes above-mentioned limitations. The resulting proxy infrastructure unleashes the power of anycast by opening up new opportunities for transparent distributed service provisioning. Taking into account user demands, available resources, network overhead and anycast infrastructure costs, we provide near- optimal heuristics for the placement of proxy nodes and dimensioning the infrastructure in large networks. We show that even modest overlay infrastructures, consisting of a small number of proxy routers, provide an effective stateful anycast solution where the detour via the proxy routers is negligible in terms of extra network load. Furthermore, simulation results illustrate that server state aggregation in the proxy nodes lessens control plane overhead, which contributes significantly to service robustness.