[menog] [Paper] Analysis of the Effects of COVID-19 Related Lockdowns on IMRS Traffic

[Fahd Batayneh]

Friends and Colleagues,

I trust this finds you well.

A new paper entitled “Analysis of the Effects of COVID-19 Related Lockdowns on IMRS Traffic” has been released by ICANN’s Office of the CTO (OCTO).

Restrictions during COVID-19-related lockdowns and school closures are expected to have a limited, but noticeable effect on the Domain Name System (DNS) traffic at ICANN Managed Root Servers (IMRS). ICANN’s Office of the Chief Technology Officer (OCTO) has studied the impact of a nationwide lockdown in France on changes in both traffic volume and composition to the four IMRS instances in France.

The Réseaux IP Européens Network Coordination Centre (RIPE NCC) Atlas probes showed that traffic for the French IMRS instances mostly originated in France. The lockdown in France started 17 March 2020 (week 12 of 2020). Traffic statistics for this week showed a 28% increase compared to the average of the previous 6 weeks. A comparative analysis was done between week 6 and week 12, and the following categories were compared:


  *   Queries for existing top-level domains (TLDs)
  *   Queries that originate from Chromium-based browsers
  *   Queries for large TLDs
  *   Queries for popular TLDs (.home, .lan, .corp, and .local)
  *   All other queries

Most categories had an increase in traffic, contributing to the overall increase. The largest category of queries originated from Chromium browsers, which remained at about one third of all received requests. Some categories grew faster than others. The largest percentage increase came from the four categories of popular nonexistent TLDs (.corp, .home, .lan and .local). This is likely due to people working more from home, as normally workers are congregated in offices using a set of resolvers that understand how to respond to .corp, .lan, and .local domains. Now, they are now more dispersed and working from home using resolvers that may not understand how to respond to these domains. This would also explain the increase in .home queries: more people using the Internet more often from their homes.

The effects of nationwide lockdowns have had a limited, but noticeable effect on the DNS traffic at IMRS instances when observed at a country level. This increase in DNS traffic can be observed overall and the fact that no issues have arisen suggests that the DNS architecture is well suited to scale during remote work and increased use at home.

Worth noting that the RIPE NCC Atlas probes were utilized to collect traffic data.

You can access the paper here >> https://www.icann.org/en/system/files/files/octo-008-en.pdf [PDF].

The full list of papers published by ICANN’s OCTO can be accessed here >> https://www.icann.org/resources/pages/octo-publications-2019-05-24-en.

Happy reading!

Thank you,

Fahd Batayneh
ICANN
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