How does the RIPE Atlas Anchors work?

RIPE Atlas Anchors are located at hosts that can provide sufficient bandwidth to support a large number of incoming and outgoing measurements. Based on this requirement, RIPE Atlas users can schedule measurements originating from anchors. In this sense, anchors act as probes, but with much greater measurement capacity than regular probes.

RIPE Atlas users can schedule measurements targeting anchors. The anchor names are encoded in such a way that they display their country and city location as well as the Autonomous System Number in which they are situated. This way, RIPE Atlas users get to choose from a list of regional targets (anchors) in different networks and in different geographical locations.

Each RIPE Atlas anchor can be used as a target for the following measurements: ping, traceroute, DNS, HTTP(s).

The RIPE NCC schedules baseline measurements, called anchoring measurements, towards the anchors. These ongoing measurements are performed by hundreds of probes from the RIPE Atlas network.