On Wed, Aug 23, 2023 at 10:43 PM, Hafiz Farooq <hmfarouq@gmail.com> wrote:
Dear RSSAC Caucus,

I thought it's worth sharing the subject research paper about optimal selection measurement of DNS Root Instance, with analysis of two approaches (shortest ASPath and geographic distance). 

https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/stamp/stamp.jsp?arnumber=10225500

Interesting paper, but it seems to be based on a flawed premise, namely that geographic and network topology are correlated. 

The paper notes:  "For example, when domestic telecom users access the I root instance, they all
access the I root Tokyo instance and Singapore instance across the border, even though there are I root Beijing and Shenyang instances in China."

Yes, so…?

Network topologies often vary wildly from geographic topology. Networks only hand off traffic to each other where they actually peer, and this may not correlate with geography at all.

As an example, a few years ago I was doing a network training at the University of Fiji in Suva. In order to reach a Fijian newspaper server in Nandi (120lm away) my packets went from Suva to Sydney on Southern Cross Cable (SCCN), changed networks in Sydney, and returned to Suva to get routed to Nandi. Return traffic would follow this same path. This is a one way trip of ~7,500KM, or a full round trip of ~15,000KM. 
Clearly this is wildly sub-optimal, but the failure here is not because of geography, the failure is that there are multiple networks in Fiji that **do not peer in Fiji**. 

If "domestic telecom users" accessing the I root instance travel to Tokyo and Singapore instead of Beijing and Shenyang, this is (largely) a failure of the network peering policies and incentives, not a failure of the RSS. Yes, I (or whoever) could potentially deploy servers on more / different networks — but the actual metrics should be "what is the latency, and is it OK?", not "what is the geographical distance?"


W



Kind Regards
Hafiz Farooq


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