The Domain Name System (DNS) and its associated protocols emerged in the early 1980s to “organize” the growing number of resources connected to and making up the ARPA Internet. As stated in an early and now obsolete “Requests for Comments” (RFC) 882 of the Internet Society, “the basic need is for a consistent name space which will be used for referring to resources” (for more recent RFCs, see, e.g., 1034 or 1035). The DNS of the early '80s targeted inadequacies of the Network Information Center (NIC) table-based mechanism for mapping between host names and Internet addresses and the lack of harmonization among burgeoning electronic mail systems. As stated in RFC 882, through the DNS “[w]e should be able to use names to retrieve host addresses, mailbox data, and other as yet undetermined information”.
Some 25 years later, the DNS as currently implemented, is somewhat underutilized. In part, underutilization is linked to the DNS's simplicity. In the DNS names refer to a set of resources and queries contain resource identifiers. As stated in RFC 882 “[t]he only standard types of information that we expect to see throughout the name space is structuring information for the name space itself, and resources that are described using domain names and no nonstandard data”. Thus, DNS as currently implemented requires no additional data; resources are typically described using only domain names and a structured name space.
The DNS alone fails to provide a remedy to severe congestion issues stemming from rising Internet traffic (e.g., due to web innovations, globalization and increasing connectivity to billions of people in emerging markets). In other words, in the DNS, as currently implemented, there is no mechanism to describe how resources exist in a network environment or to describe local conditions in a network environment. As described herein, various exemplary systems, methods, etc., can describe network conditions and make the Internet more efficient.