CDN-based Domain Name Resolving System

To translate users-friendly identified network resources domain names intomachine readable IP addresses, Domain Name System (DNS) is important networkinfrastructure, the cornerstone of the Internet. A varity of Internet services, such as Webservice, Email service etc, are built upon DNS.To enhance end-user experience, ContentDelivery Networks (CDNs) effectively exploit the DNS to redirect users to close-bycontent replica over short time scales. The use of DNS redirection has brought asignificant advantage to CDNs. However, in the rapid changing Internet environmentthat a variety of domain name resolving services are emerging, the reliance on DNS alsoposes a fundermental threat to CDNs.This work analyzed the impact of recent emerging IP-Anycast-based domain nameresolving services on CDN's large scale content distribution and quick DNS redirection.Based on the analysis, focusing on Akamai CDN, the experiments in this worksystematically evaluated and quantified these impacts on the Akamai CDN's loadbalance, the performance of services hosted by Akamai CDN, and the inter-AS trafficgenerated by Akamai CDN. The author of this work demonstrated that the emergingchallenges on CDNs provided a great opportunity to distribute DNS records on CDNsand host domain name resolving service on CDNs. Thus, it can in one hand relieve theadverse status of CDNs and in another hand deploy a superior DNS system that couldbenefit the whole Internet community.Aimed at the longlasting performance and security issues in domain nameresolving services, and motivated by retrieving the adverse status of CDNs, this workproposed a CDN-based domain name resolving system model. In particular, the modelrelies on CDNs, distributes and replicates authoritative DNS records with a push-basedapproach, intergrates the function of resolvers and nameservers at CDN's edge servers,and improves the performance of domain name resolving service in efficiency,reliability and security etc. Furthermore, the model is imcrementally deployable andnecessarily compatible and coexistence with current DNS infrastructure, and can furthergradually replace current DNS. Finally, the model is also compatible with CDN's content distribution.Based on the above model, this work implemented it to Akamai CDN andconstructed an Akamai-CDN-based domain name system. By using Akamai CDNhosted Web2.0websites as the vehicle, such a system achieves the distribution ofauthoritative DNS records to Akamai CDN's edge servers which are geographicallywide distributed. The experiments proved that such a system can achieve10~20timesfaster DNS lookup time relative to current DNS resolving services. Most importantly,the proposed design provides a realistic way to change DNS and address a number oflonglasting and emerging problems associated with this basic Internet service.