Design and Implementation of a Test Program for Benchmarking DNS64 Servers

Abstract

A new Internet Draft on benchmarking methodologies for IPv6 transition technologies including DNS64 was adopted by the Benchmarking Working Group of IETF. The aim of our effort is to design and implement a test program that complies with the draft and thus to create the world's first standard DNS64 benchmarking tool. In this paper, we disclose our design considerations and high-level implementation decisions. The precision of our special timing method is tested and found to be excellent. Due to the prudent design, the performance of our test program is also excellent: it can send more than 200,000 AAAA record requests using a single core of a desktop computer with a 3.2GHz Intel Core i5-4570 CPU. Its operation comprises all the functionalities required by the draft including checking the timeliness and validity of the answers of the tested DNS64 server. Our DNS64 benchmarking program, dns64perf++, is distributed as free software under GNU GPL v2 license for the benefit of the research, benchmarking and networking communities.