Speaker
Dr
Frédéric OUEDRAOGO
(Université de Koudougou)
Description
The accessibility of the Web pages relies on the services of the Domain
Name System (DNS) through their servers around the world. The Domain
Name System is a hierarchical distributed naming system for computers
and network services. The main service of the DNS consists to translate
the domain names using by humans to the numerical ip addresses needed
for the purpose of computers and others services. The DNS play a key
role in the control of the web users. It is often used to block the use of
a target website. For instance, Turkey has used a false resolution of the
DNS queries to block the famous social networks Twitter and Facebook
out of its citizens.
In this paper we evaluate the quality of the DNS service through the
access to the root name servers of West African countries. Precisely, we
measure the Round trip time (RTT) of icmp echo reply packets sent
from two monitors to these servers. The RTT is the time for a packet to
travel from a given source to a given destination, plus the time to back
from the destination to the source. The RTT is an important value that
takes part in the estimation of the quality of various network systems.
From the iana database, we retrieve the root name servers ipv4 ad-
dresses that have authority on the country top-level domains (ccTLDs)
of Burkina, Benin, Cote-d'Ivoire, Ghana, Niger, Nigeria, Liberia, Sénégal
Mali and Togo.
From monitors located in Ouagadougou and Paris, We perform peri-
odically the RTT measurement by sending at each two minutes an icmp
echo resquest toward each DNS server. The monitor in Burkina Faso
is inside the West Africa zone and the monitor in France outside
this zone. Obviously, having a monitor in each West African country may
provide more information but this measurement framework is out of our
reach. We assume that the monitors from these two locations will give
a representative overview of the accessibility of the concerned root name
servers.
Each country has at least four root name server, but most of them are
hosted in foreign countries, precisely in other continents. For example,
some countries (Liberia, Mali,...) have all their servers hosted by foreign
countries but the majority hosts one or two of their root name servers.
The mean of the RTTs of root name servers on a sample of 3 hours of
measurement (about one hundred rounds) shows the time to access the
root name servers hosted by their own countries is relatively high. We
made the same observation with the two monitors, precisely this time is
higher with the monitor located in Ouagadougou (700 milliseconds on average)
than the one in Paris (200 milliseconds on average). However, the access to
the root name servers hosted in foreign countries is better, 5 milliseconds
for the monitor in Paris and 400 milliseconds for the one in Ouagadougou. The
access to the services provided by the root name servers of West African
Countries hosted by the owner is not efficient. It is particularly worse for
requests coming from Burkina Faso.
Despite the geographical proximity, a dns request coming from France
has better access to root name servers hosted in West Africa than a re-
quest coming from inside this zone. Beyond the accessibility of these dns
servers, our observation shows how is the state of the Internet between
West African countries.
Primary author
Dr
Frédéric OUEDRAOGO
(Université de Koudougou)
Co-author
Mr
Didier BASSOLE
(Université Ouaga 1)