Application-layer anycasting

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Abstract
Server replication is a key approach for maintaining user-perceived quality of service within a geographically wide-spread network. The anycasting communication paradigm is designed to support server replication by allowing applications to easily select and communicate with the ``best" server, according to some performance or policy criteria, in a group of content-equivalent servers. We examine the definition and support of the anycasting paradigm at the application layer, providing a service that maps anycast domain names into one or more IP addresses using anycast resolvers. In addition to being independent from network-layer support, our definition includes the notion of filters, functions that are applied to groups of addresses to affect the selection process. We consider both metric-based filters (e.g., server response time) and policy-based filters; we further allow filtering both at the anycast resolver and local to the anycast client. A key input to the filtering process is metric information describing the relative performance of replicated servers. We examine the use of various techniques for maintaining this information at anycast resolvers.

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