Putting DNS in Context

Abstract

Internet traffic generally relies on the Domain Name System (DNS) to map human-friendly hostnames into IP addresses. While the community has studied many facets of the system in isolation, this paper aims to study the DNS in context. With data from a residential ISP we study DNS along with both activity before an application needs a given mapping and the subsequent application transaction. We find that a majority of applications transactions (i) incur no direct DNS costs and (ii) for those that do the cost is minimal.