DNS-based Internet client clustering and characterization

This paper proposes a novel protocol which uses the Internet domain name system (DNS) to partition Web clients into disjoint sets, each of which is associated with a single DNS server. We define an L-DNS cluster to be a grouping of Web clients that use the same Local DNS server to resolve Internet host names. We identify such clusters in real-time using data obtained from a Web Server in conjunction with that server's authoritative DNS-both instrumented with an implementation of our clustering algorithm. Using these clusters, we perform measurements from four distinct Internet locations. Our results show that L-DNS clustering enables a better estimation of proximity of a Web client to a Web server than previously proposed techniques. Thus, in a content distribution network, a DNS-based scheme that redirects a request from a web client to one of many servers based on the client's name server coordinates (e.g., hops/latency/loss-rates) would perform better with our algorithm.