PREFETCHing to Overcome DNSSEC Performance Issue on Large Resolving Platform

Todays´ DNS resolving platforms have been designed for DNS with fast and light resolutions over the Internet. With signature checks and larger payload, experimental measurements [10] showed that DNSSEC resolutions require up to 4 times more CPU. While DNSSEC requires more CPU than DNS, this paper proposes PREFETCH_X, an architecture that optimizes the use of CPU and thus avoids that resolving platforms increase their size for DNSSEC migration. Current resolving platforms IP_XOR split the traffic between the nodes according to the IP addresses. Alternatively, PREFETCH_X takes advantage of the FQDN´s popularity distribution (Zipf), a layered cache and cache sharing mechanisms between the nodes and requires at least 4 times less nodes. Furthermore PREFETCH_X does not impact the network infrastructure which eases its deployment. Then, defining X the number of prefetched FQDNs makes PREFETCH_X highly scalable and flexible to different type of traffic.