DEW: DNS-Enhanced Web for Faster Content Delivery

With a key component of latency on the Web being connection set up between clients and Web servers, several ways to avoid connections have been explored. While the work in recent years on Content Distribution Networks (CDNs) have moved some content ‘closer’ to users at the cost of increasing DNS traffic, they have not fully exploited the available unused potential of existing protocols. We explore ways by which a variety of Web responses can be piggybacked on DNS messages. While we evaluated our idea in the Web context, the approach is generic and not restricted to Web responses. We propose an architecture for HTTP piggybacking in DNS messages and carry out a detailed performance analysis based on a trace-driven simulation study. Our architecture requires minimal extensions to existing protocols, utilizing only the allowed optional fields for these extensions. It is fully compatible and can coexist with the current Web.