Self-adapting load balancing for DNS

The Domain Name System belongs to the core services of the Internet infrastructure. Hence, DNS availability and performance is essential for the operation of the Internet and replication and load balancing is used for the root and top level name servers. This paper proposes an architecture for credit based server load balancing (SLB) for DNS. Compared to traditional load balancing algorithms like round robin or least connection, the benefit of credit based SLB is that the load balancer can adapt more easily to heterogeneous load requests and heterogeneous back end server capacities. The challenge of this approach is the definition of a suited credit metric. While this was done before for TCP based services like HTTP, the problem was not solved for UDP based services like DNS. This paper presents an approach to define credits also for UDP based services. This UDP/DNS approach is implemented within the credit based SLB implementation salbnet. The presented measurements confirm the benefit of the self-adapting credit based SLB approach.