ASTAS: Architecture for Scalable and Transparent Anycast Services

Native information provider(IP) anycast suffers from routing scalability issues and the lack of stateful communication support. For this reason, we propose architecture for scalable and transparent anycast services(ASTAS), a proxy-based architecture that provides support for stateful anycast communications, while retaining the transparency offered by native anycast. Dynamic resource assignment for each initiated session guarantees that a connection is established with the most suitable target server, based on network and server conditions. Traffic engineering in the overlay can be realized in an effective way due to the dissemination of aggregated state information in the anycast overlay. To minimize the total deployment cost for ASTAS architectures, we propose optimized proxy placement and path finding heuristics based on look-ahead information gathered in network nodes. Contrary to a regular integer linear program(ILP) formulation, these heuristics allow to optimize proxy placement in large networks. A use case on a European reference network illustrates that lower proxy costs enable proxy deployment closer to the end-users, resulting in a reduced network load.