The legacy DNS [25,26] is organized as a static, distributed tree. The namespace is hierarchically partitioned into non-overlapping regions called domains. For example, cs.cornell.edu is a sub-domain of the domain cornell.edu, which in turn is a sub-domain of the top-level domain edu. Top-level domains are sub-domains of a global root domain. Domain names, such as www.cs.cornell.edu, belong to nameowners.
Extensible data structures, called resource records, are used to associate values of different types with domain names. These values may include the corresponding IP address, mail host, owner name and the like. The DNS query interface allows these records to be retrieved by a query containing a domain name and a type.
The legacy DNS delegates the responsibility for each domain to a set of replicated nameservers called authoritative nameservers. The authoritative nameservers of a domain manage all information for names in that domain, keep track of authoritative nameservers of the sub-domains rooted at their domain, and are administered by namespace operators. At the top of the legacy DNS hierarchy are root nameservers, which keep track of the authoritative nameservers for the top-level domains (TLDs). The top-level domain namespace consists of generic TLDs (gTLD), such as .com, .edu, and .net, and country-code TLDs (ccTLD), such as .uk, .tr, and .in. Nameservers are statically configured with thirteen IP addresses for the root servers. BGP-level anycast is used in parts of the Internet to reroute queries destined for these thirteen IP addresses to a local root server.
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Resolvers in the legacy DNS operate on behalf of clients to map queries to matching resource records. Clients typically issue DNS queries to local resolvers within their own administrative domain. Resolvers follow a chain of authoritative nameservers in order to resolve the query. The local resolver contacts a root nameserver to find the top-level domain nameserver. It then issues the query to the TLD nameserver and obtains the authoritative nameserver of the next sub-domain. The authoritative nameserver of the sub-domain replies with the response for the query. This process continues recursively or iteratively until the authoritative nameserver of the queried domain is reached. Figure 1 illustrates the different stages in the resolution of an example domain name www.cs.cornell.edu. While this figure provides a simple overview of the communication involved in name resolution, in practice, each query may trigger additional lookups to resolve intermediate nameservers [25,26].
Pursuing a chain of delegations to resolve a query naturally incurs significant delay. The legacy DNS incorporates aggressive caching in order to reduce the latency of query resolution. The resolvers cache responses to queries they issue, and use the cached responses to answer future queries. Since records may change dynamically, legacy DNS provides a weak form of cache coherency through a time-to-live (TTL) field. Each record carries a TTL assigned by the authoritative nameserver, and may be cached until TTL expires.