Subject: [ippm] is it within IPPM scope to discuss Load Measurement and site preference of App Servers using ANYCAST?

From: Linda Dunbar <[email-masked]>
Date: Mon, 16 Nov 2020 05:29:13 +0000

IPPM experts,

Network delay, jitter, bandwidth are common network layer measurements. In 5G Edge Computing environment, one Application can have multiple Application Servers hosted in different Edge Computing data centers that are close in proximity. Those Edge Computing (mini) data centers are usually very close to, or co-located with, 5G base stations, with the goal to minimize latency and optimize the user experience. Increasingly, Anycast is used for App Servers to dynamically load balance across multiple locations of the same address based on network conditions.  Using Anycast address leverages the proximity information present in the network (routing) layer and eliminates the single point of failure and bottleneck at the DNS resolvers and application layer load balancers,  in addition to  removing the dependency on UEs that use their cached IP addresses instead of querying DNS when they move to a new location.

But simply based on network condition is not enough, as some locations have higher capacity or more preferences for a special User Equipment.

https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/draft-dunbar-ippm-5g-edge-compute-ip-layer-metrics/ introduce the additional IP Layer Metrics to achieve optimized forwarding to servers using ANYCAST.

is it within IPPM scope to discuss Load Measurement and site preference of App Servers using ANYCAST?

Appreciate your feedback.

Thank you
Linda Dunbar