DACS PhD Candidate Remi Hendriks Wins Best Student Paper Award at IMC 2025

We’re proud to share that DACS PhD candidate Remi Hendriks has won the Best Student Paper Award at the Internet Measurement Conference (IMC) 2025 for his work “LACeS: An Open, Fast, Responsible, and Efficient Longitudinal Anycast Census System.”

The paper, written with collaborators from CAIDA, introduces LACeS, a new system that makes large-scale, continuous measurement of anycast deployments across the Internet possible. Anycast helps reduce latency and increase resilience by serving the same IP address from multiple locations. Despite its importance in the modern Internet, understanding where and how anycast is deployed has always been tricky.

Earlier tools like iGreedy and MAnycast2 provided partial solutions but came with trade-offs: one was fast yet less accurate, the other slower but precise. LACeS bridges that gap by rethinking the entire measurement pipeline. It adds distributed probing, supports multiple protocols (DNS over UDP, TCP SYN/ACK, IPv6), and integrates latency checks similar to iGreedy. Validation on a 32-node global testbed, combined with comparisons against operator ground truth, shows that LACeS delivers both speed and accuracy.

Beyond its technical contribution, the project reflects DACS’s broader commitment to open, sustained Internet measurement. Daily anycast censuses from LACeS are now freely available to the community, together with the open-source code, giving researchers and network operators access to one of the most complete longitudinal views of anycast infrastructure to date.

Read the paper here: https://www.caida.org/catalog/papers/2025_laces/laces.pdf