Translations:Root Zone/10/en

Root Scaling Study Report

The SSAC, RSSAC and ICANN Staff responded to the request of the ICANN Board by creating a Scaling Steering Group to conduct the study. On September 7, 2009, a report entitled: Report on the Impact on the DNS Root System of Increasing the Size and Volatility of the Root Zone was submitted by the Root Scaling Study Team for the Scaling Steering Group with the following findings and recommendations:

• Any of the proposed changes has an effect to the growth of the root zone. The study team suggested that it is best to add or make changes to the root zone with a large or sudden impact. Gradual changes can be added at later stages.
• Additional new TLDs will increase both the number of entries and the size of the root zone, however an increase in the number of TLDs will not increase the number of request per year per TLD.
• Adding DNSSEC changes the nature of the root zone wherein it will no longer be an atomic unit or an individual resource record, instead it will be a group resource record. Implementation of DNSSEC will result in a much bigger amount of data carried in the zone as well as larger zone transfers. Signature and other security related data will be added to queries to the DNS, and thus it needs more bandwidth network resources and the signature data needs to be regularly updated because they have expiration dates to avoid serving bad data and to avoid replay attacks.
• Additional IDN results to changes in the root zone similar to adding a TLD.
• Adding IPv6 records to the root zone will add glue records for the name server of every TLD. This means that the amount of data increases per TLD in the root zone and the number of changes per TLD will also increase each year.