Lessons in Location and Identity through Remote Peering

We normally encounter four different kinds of addresses in an IP network; we tend to think about each of these as:

  • The MAC address identifies an interface on a physical or virtual wire
  • The IP address identifies an interface on a host
  • The DNS name identifies a host
  • The port number identifies an application or service running on the host

There are other address-like things, of course, such as the protocol number, a router ID, an MPLS label, etc. But let’s stick to these four for the moment. Looking through this list, the first thing you should notice is we often use the IP address as if it identified a host—which is generally not a good thing. There have been some efforts in the past to split the locator from the identifier, but the IP protocol suite was designed with a separate locator and identifier already: the IP address is the location and the DNS name is the identifier.

Even if you split up the locator and the identifier, however, the word locator is still quite ambiguous because we often equate the geographical and topological locations. In fact, old police procedural shows used to include scenes where a suspect was tracked down because they were using an IP address “assigned to them” in some other city… When the topic comes up this way, we can see the obvious flaw. In other situations, conflating the IP address with the location of the device is less obvious, and causes more subtle problems.

Consider, for instance, the concept of remote peering. Suppose you want to connect to a cloud provider who has a presence in an IXP that’s just a few hundred miles away. You calculate the costs of placing a router on the IX fabric, add it to the cost of bringing up a new circuit to the IX, and … well, there’s no way you are ever going to get that kind of budget approved. Looking around, though, you find there is a company that already has a router connected to the IX fabric you want to be on, and they offer a remote peering solution, which means they offer to build an Ethernet tunnel across the public Internet to your edge router. Once the tunnel is up, you can peer your local router to the cloud provider’s network using BGP. The cloud provider thinks you have a device physically connected to the local IX fabric, so all is well, right?

In a recent paper, a group of researchers looked at the combination of remote peering and anycast addresses. If you are not familiar with anycast addresses, the concept is simple: take a service which is replicated across multiple locations and advertise every instance of the service using a single IP address. This is clever because when you send packets to the IP address representing the service, you will always reach the closest instance of the service. So long as you have not played games with stretched Ethernet, that is.

In the paper, the researchers used various mechanisms to figure out where remote peering was taking place, and another to discover services being advertised using anycast (normally DNS or CDN services). Using the intersection of these two, they determined if remote peering was impacting the performance of any of these services. I shocked, shocked, to tell you the answer is yes. I would never have expected stretched Ethernet to have a negative impact on performance. 😊

To quote the paper directly:

…we found that 38% (126/332) of RTTs in traceroutes towards anycast prexes potentially aected by remote peering are larger than the average RTT of prexes without remote peering. In these 126 traceroute probes, the average RTT towards prexes potentially aected by remote peering is 119.7 ms while the average RTT of the other prexes is 84.7 ms.

The bottom line: “An average latency increase of 35.1 ms.” This is partially because the two different meanings of the word location come into play when you are interacting with services like CDNs and DNS. These services will always try to serve your requests from a physical location close to you. When you are using Ethernet stretched over IP, however, your topological location (where you connect to the network) and your geographical location (where you are physically located on the face of the Earth) can be radically different. Think about the mental dislocation when you call someone with an area code that is normally tied to an area of the west coast of the US, and yet you know they now live around London, say…

We could probably add in a bit of complexity to solve these problems, or (even better) just include your GPS coordinates in the IP header. After all, what’s the point of privacy? … 🙂 The bottom line is this: remote peering might a good idea when everything else fails, of course, but if you haven’t found the tradeoffs, you haven’t looked hard enough. It might be that application performance across a remote peering session is low enough that paying for the connection might turn out cheaper.

In the meantime, wake me up when we decide that stretching Ethernet over IP is never a good thing.