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