A Comparative Study of the DNS Design with DHT-Based Alternatives

— The current Domain Name System (DNS) follows a hierarchical tree structure. Several recent efforts proposed to re-implement DNS as a peer-to-peer network with a flat structure that uses Distributed Hash Tables (DHT) to improve the system availability. In this paper we compare the performance and availability of these two designs, enabled by caching and redundancy in both cases. We show that the caching and redundancy mechanisms in each design are closely bound to its system structure. We further demonstrate that each of the two system structures provides unique advantages over the other, while each has its own shortcomings. Using analysis and tracedriven simulations, we show that hierarchical structure enables high performance caching and that DHT structures provide high degree of robustness against targeted attacks. We further show that the current DNS design offers engineering flexibilities which have been utilized to optimize system performance under typical Internet failures ...

• Type: Conference
• Year: 2006
• Where: INFOCOM
• Authors: Vasileios Pappas, Daniel Massey, Andreas Terzis, Lixia Zhang
• Keywords: Caching, Communications, Hierarchical Tree Structure, INFOCOM 2006, Re-implement Dns