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From req/res to pub/sub: Exploring Media over QUIC Transport for DNS

Mathis Engelbart, Mike Kosek, Lars Eggert, Jörg Ott

TL;DR

The paper addresses the latency and traffic inefficiencies of TTL-based DNS by proposing DNS over MoQT, a publish-subscribe DNS variant built on the MoQT transport over QUIC. It explains a strawman design that maps DNS messages to MoQT tracks and objects, enabling push-based propagation of RR updates with strictly increasing version numbers, and provides a prototype demonstrating reduced update time and traffic under common TTL regimes. The contributions include the MoQT-based mapping, subscription/teardown semantics, compatibility strategies for incremental deployment, and a practical evaluation highlighting both benefits and overheads such as state management and first-lookup latency. This approach offers a scalable path to near real-time DNS updates for use cases like CDN load balancing and space networks, while outlining key challenges to be addressed in deployment and privacy.

Abstract

The DNS is a key component of the Internet. Originally designed to facilitate the resolution of host names to IP addresses, its scope has continuously expanded over the years, today covering use cases such as load balancing or service discovery. While DNS was initially conceived as a rather static directory service in which resource records (RR) only change rarely, we have seen a number of use cases over the years where a DNS flavor that isn't purely based upon requesting and caching RRs, but rather on an active distribution of updates for all resolvers that showed interest in the respective records in the past, would be preferable. In this paper, we thus explore a publish-subscribe variant of DNS based on the Media-over-QUIC architecture, where we devise a strawman system and protocol proposal to enable pushing RR updates. We provide a prototype implementation, finding that DNS can benefit from a publish-subscribe variant: next to limiting update traffic, it can considerably reduce the time it takes for a resolver to receive the latest version of a record, thereby supporting use cases such as load balancing in content distribution networks. The publish-subscribe architecture also brings new challenges to the DNS, including a higher overhead for endpoints due to additional state management, and increased query latencies on first lookup, due to session establishment latencies.

From req/res to pub/sub: Exploring Media over QUIC Transport for DNS

TL;DR

The paper addresses the latency and traffic inefficiencies of TTL-based DNS by proposing DNS over MoQT, a publish-subscribe DNS variant built on the MoQT transport over QUIC. It explains a strawman design that maps DNS messages to MoQT tracks and objects, enabling push-based propagation of RR updates with strictly increasing version numbers, and provides a prototype demonstrating reduced update time and traffic under common TTL regimes. The contributions include the MoQT-based mapping, subscription/teardown semantics, compatibility strategies for incremental deployment, and a practical evaluation highlighting both benefits and overheads such as state management and first-lookup latency. This approach offers a scalable path to near real-time DNS updates for use cases like CDN load balancing and space networks, while outlining key challenges to be addressed in deployment and privacy.

Abstract

The DNS is a key component of the Internet. Originally designed to facilitate the resolution of host names to IP addresses, its scope has continuously expanded over the years, today covering use cases such as load balancing or service discovery. While DNS was initially conceived as a rather static directory service in which resource records (RR) only change rarely, we have seen a number of use cases over the years where a DNS flavor that isn't purely based upon requesting and caching RRs, but rather on an active distribution of updates for all resolvers that showed interest in the respective records in the past, would be preferable. In this paper, we thus explore a publish-subscribe variant of DNS based on the Media-over-QUIC architecture, where we devise a strawman system and protocol proposal to enable pushing RR updates. We provide a prototype implementation, finding that DNS can benefit from a publish-subscribe variant: next to limiting update traffic, it can considerably reduce the time it takes for a resolver to receive the latest version of a record, thereby supporting use cases such as load balancing in content distribution networks. The publish-subscribe architecture also brings new challenges to the DNS, including a higher overhead for endpoints due to additional state management, and increased query latencies on first lookup, due to session establishment latencies.

Paper Structure

This paper contains 16 sections, 4 figures.

Table of Contents

  1. Introduction
  2. On the dynamics of today's DNS
  3. Media-over-QUIC
  4. Design
  5. Lookup Operation
  6. Lookup Operation
  7. Update Operation
  8. Message Formats
  9. Subscription Teardown
  10. Compatibility
  11. Compatibility
  12. Discussion
  13. State Management Overhead
  14. Query Latency
  15. Use Case Discussion
  16. ...and 1 more sections

Figures (4)

  • Figure 1: TTL distribution and A record change rate
  • Figure 2: Recursive DNS over MoQT Lookup Sequence
  • Figure 3: DNS Query to MoQT namespace and trackname mapping
  • Figure 4: DNS response encapsulation in MoQT objects