A framework for DNS naming services for Internet-of-Things devices

Abstract

This paper proposes a new naming framework for Domain Name System (DNS) Name Autoconfiguration (called DNSNA) for Internet of Things (IoT) devices in Internet Protocol (IP) version 6 (IPv6) and IP version 4 (IPv4) networks. As the number of IoT devices increases, it can be a burden for users to manually configure the DNS names of the IoT devices. We propose DNSNA to provide an efficient DNS name management for IoT devices, supporting an IoT device’s DNS name auto-generation, its DNS name auto-registration, device discovery, and service discovery. A user can easily use the registered DNS information of the IoT devices for both device discovery and service discovery through DNSNA. DNSNA uses IPv6 Neighbor Discovery (ND) protocol for IPv6 IoT devices and Dynamic Host Configuration Protocol (DHCP) for IPv4 IoT devices, respectively, in the IoT DNS name autoconfiguration. With either ND or DHCP, the IoT devices can obtain a DNS suffix and construct their DNS name. Also, through a physical-contact-based authentication of a user’s smartphone with an IoT device over Near Field Communication (NFC), an authenticated IoT device can automatically register its DNS name and the corresponding IP address into a local authoritative DNS server in a secure way. Through real experiments and analysis, it is shown that DNSNA can reduce the average number of packets by 60.8% and the accumulated packet volume by 97% in comparison with the existing DNS naming service (i.e., mDNS) for IoT devices in an IPv6 network.