Study on Response Times to LACTLD’s Anycast Cloud

31/08/2021

According to a research conducted by LACNIC related to Internet security, stability and resilience studies, the countries of the Southern Cone have the best response times in Latin America and the Caribbean for queries to the name servers that are part of LACTLD’s Anycast Cloud.

Preliminary data from the study, which includes queries from the first three months, show that most of the response times in Argentina, Brazil, Chile, Uruguay and Paraguay are below 50 milliseconds. This represents a very good performance at a global level. LACTLD’s Anycast Cloud is a collaborative network that currently has 14 nodes and seeks to strengthen the DNS infrastructure and stability in Latin America and the Caribbean.  Measurements are made by processing publicly available data, using the RIPE Atlas Project Probes to measure access times to the aforementioned servers.

“We focused on LACTLD’s Anycast Cloud because many of the region’s domains are replicated in it, and many ccTLDs are using LACTLD’s servers to host copies of their country domain zones. LACNIC also hosts secondary copies of many of its zones in this infrastructure,” said Guillermo Cicileo, Head of Internet Infrastructure Research and Development at LACNIC. The expert estimated that it will be possible to see more stable graphs after a year of gathering data.

Chilean expert Hugo Salgado, DNS Researcher and member of the LACTLD Project Management Team, explained that Anycast is an addressing technology that allows optimal and efficient use of networks.

In the case of the LACTLD Cloud and the measurements taken, the response to queries to that “database” from different countries was verified.

“We focused on the access times from each country to that LACTLD Cloud, and how long it took for the response to go through the country’s networks all the way to the nearest node of the domains contained,” Salgado added.

The Data According to the measurements taken, the networks of the countries in the South American region showed better response levels compared to the rest of the countries in the continent.

Average Response Time from LAC Networks to LACTLD DNS

Salgado admitted that beyond the Southern Cone, every country is above 50 milliseconds. These countries could optimize their response times.

 Salgado pointed out that for each query, the routing systems choose which of all the available nodes is the “closest” to the point of origin of the query and then direct it to this point in the Anycast Cloud, thus speeding up responses.

In relation to the average time, the map of the region shows where the strengths and weaknesses are and helps to better schedule the next connections. “These data is very valuable to assist in the project approach, especially with countries that do not have good response times,” Salgado added.

Regional Maps: Average Response Time to Anycast LACTLD Cloud

The data collected is used to schedule where to install the next cloud nodes and to solve internal connectivity failures in case the node is not reached. “The study is providing a lot of data for those who manage the nodes in the different countries,” said the Chilean researcher.

Countries with poorer results should host a copy of a LACTLD cloud node within their territory and those that already have one can improve their routing, how they connect the node.

Cicileo assured that a good Internet performance is favored if the domains of each country can be consulted in reasonable times, for which the LACTLD Cloud is a project that provides a better geographic distribution of the name servers in the countries that host their zones there. This study makes it possible to analyze those times from different measurement points in each country.

The study is continuously reported so that when a new node is connected, it is possible to analyze the before and after.