iDNS: Enabling information centric networking through The DNS

Information centric networking (ICN) architectures represent a conceptual shift from naming end-hosts in the Internet to naming content directly, and require either significant changes to the existing IP infrastructure or replacing it entirely. We present iDNS (information-centric DNS), an evolutionary path towards deploying ICN at Internet scale based on modifications to the DNS that leave the current routing infrastructure unmodified. We build and evaluate an iDNS prototype, and use it to show that iDNS achieves the benefits associated with ICN (i.e. location-independent naming, nearest-replica-routing) in a manner that both leverages current infrastructure, including content delivery protocols and caches, and supports future evolution towards other network-layer ICN architectures.