An Approach for Determining the Health of the DNS?

Domain Name system (DNS) is a global and decentralized system comprising of several types of nodes across geographies that are critical in resolving billions of translation queries ? from IP addresses to domain names and vice versa ? in the Internet at any given moment. A stable and healthy DNS is therefore important for the smooth functioning of the internet which in turn is dependent on the millions of nodes that comprise it. However determining the health of the global DNS at any given moment remains infeasible, as it will require conducting millions of probes at every level in the DNS hierarchy. In this paper, we propose a simple approach that will be able to approximate the health of the DNS, by determining the critical nodes in the DNS hierarchy, which is passively and periodically monitored. The proposed approach is evaluated with an emulated setup and the initial results are encouraging.