| Internet-Draft | Problems and Requirements of DNS for IoA | October 2025 |
| Ye, et al. | Expires 23 April 2026 | [Page] |
In the AI-driven era, DNS is supposed to evolve with technological advancements to accommodate the complex and diverse requirements of the IoA. This draft analyzes the issues surrounding DNS in supporting agents collaboration and explores corresponding technical requirements.¶
This Internet-Draft is submitted in full conformance with the provisions of BCP 78 and BCP 79.¶
Internet-Drafts are working documents of the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF). Note that other groups may also distribute working documents as Internet-Drafts. The list of current Internet-Drafts is at https://datatracker.ietf.org/drafts/current/.¶
Internet-Drafts are draft documents valid for a maximum of six months and may be updated, replaced, or obsoleted by other documents at any time. It is inappropriate to use Internet-Drafts as reference material or to cite them other than as "work in progress."¶
This Internet-Draft will expire on 23 April 2026.¶
Copyright (c) 2025 IETF Trust and the persons identified as the document authors. All rights reserved.¶
This document is subject to BCP 78 and the IETF Trust's Legal Provisions Relating to IETF Documents (https://trustee.ietf.org/license-info) in effect on the date of publication of this document. Please review these documents carefully, as they describe your rights and restrictions with respect to this document. Code Components extracted from this document must include Revised BSD License text as described in Section 4.e of the Trust Legal Provisions and are provided without warranty as described in the Revised BSD License.¶
In the AI-driven era of intelligence, as intelligent agents with autonomous capabilities in perception, decision-making, execution, and learning enter the network, the network ecosystem is undergoing a profound transformation towards intelligentization and autonomization. Agents, as the core interconnected entities in the Internet of Agents (IoA), autonomously discover, efficiently interact, and harmoniously collaborate with human users, other agents, and various tools, enabling flexible resource scheduling and promoting the Internet towards intelligentization and autonomization.¶
Currently, the stable operation of the network heavily relies on IP addresses, with the Domain Name System (DNS) serving as a critical network infrastructure responsible for converting human-readable domain names to machine-readable addresses and acting as a bridge for network resources access. However, in the context of the flourishing development of AI agents, the DNS is supposed to evolve with technological advancements to accommodate the complex and diverse requirements of the IoA. During interactions and collaborations between humans and agents, agents and agents, DNS as an infrastructure will continue to play a key role, providing technical support for efficient agent registration and discovery, real-time data synchronization, and intelligent scheduleing and decision-making. Moreover, its capabilities might be further expanded to achieve semantic awareness, and effective orchestration of agents interactions.¶
This draft aims to conduct an in-depth analysis of the issues surrounding the DNS system in supporting agents collaboration and to explore corresponding technical requirements, thereby providing robust support for the large-scale implementation and efficiency enhancement of the IoA.¶
DNS: Domain Name System¶
DNS-SD: DNS-Based Service Discovery¶
EDNS: Extension Mechanisms for DNS¶
The key words "MUST", "MUST NOT", "REQUIRED", "SHALL", "SHALL NOT", "SHOULD", "SHOULD NOT", "RECOMMENDED", "NOT RECOMMENDED", "MAY", and "OPTIONAL" in this document are to be interpreted as described in BCP 14 [RFC2119] [RFC8174] when, and only when, they appear in all capitals, as shown here.¶
DNS, centered around domain names and IP addresses, fulfills a crucial role in addressing, mapping domain names to IP addresses. However, the most interactions among agents are based on capabilities. The current names of each level domains in the hierarchical architecture, which primarily convey information, such as organization and region, fails to intuitively reflect the capabilities of agents, making it difficult for other agents to quickly grasp and describe their basic functionalities.¶
Meanwhile, it is predicted that the number of AI agents will reach the scale of hundreds of billions in the future. Therefore, existing IP addresses will struggle to identify agents effectively. Given the limited address space of IPv4, it isinadequate to support large-scale agent deployment and ensure stable connectivity. Even if a full transition to IPv6, which offers abundant address resources, can alleviate the address shortage, issues such as address instability and oversized routing tables will still arise. This is because that the IPv6 interface IDs undergo periodic rotation for security. Additionally, the IPv6 addresses of some physical AI agents, such as embodied intelligent agents, dynamically change with variations of their geographical locations and the network they access. The aforementioned factors make it challenging to uniquely identify an intelligent agent using its IP address.¶
Interactions in IoA exhibit high frequency and complexity. On one hand, agent interactions often involve multiple subtask calls within a single task query, triggering multiple DNS queries and significantly increasing the number of queries and densities, accompanied by parallel queries. This high-frequency and concurrent query pattern imposes extremely high demands on the processing performance of the DNS sytem.¶
On the other hand, as businesses undergo continuous evolution and agents engage in frequent interactions, the service types and operational states of agents are in a state of constant change. New services continually emerge, while existing services may be gradually phased out or subject to updates. Meanwhile, agent states may transition from active to inactive, or continuously fluctuate load conditions. However, the resource records (RR) within the existing DNS system remain static and are updated only infrequently, thereby failing to accurately and promptly reflect the latest situations of agents.¶
Additionally, with the emergence of new agents, corresponding resource records will be generated accordingly. However, manually adding records to authoritative servers are inefficient and cannot keep pace with the rapid generation of agents. Moreover, in the Internet, considering the intricate roles and the enormous quantity of devices involved, the current service discovery and registration mechanisms (e.g. DNS-SD [RFC6763]) are deficient in essential security authentication capabilities, rendering them ineffective for application in the IoA. Consequently, this situation underscores an urgent necessity for developing a service discovery and registration mechanism specifically tailored to the IoA.¶
The resolution mechanism of the current DNS system is relatively simplistic and falls short of optimally matching capabilities with resources during agent interactions. When processing multiple resource records associated with the same triple (name, class, type), existing mechanisms frequently depend on scheduling dimensions such as round-robin, weights, and geographical proximity. Although there are scenarios that take resource load into account, these mechanisms merely offer crude estimations based on simple request counts. Such estimations can significantly deviate from the actual load, thereby leading to reduced scheduling flexibility and accuracy.¶
The proliferation of agents is driving the network towards enhanced efficiency, intelligence, and flexibility. During the processes of autonomous discovery, efficient interaction, and collaborative collaboration among agents as well as between agents and users, new requirements are imposed on the DNS, such as identitication, data structure, and resolution mode. The detailed requirement analysis of the key capabilities required for the DNS within the IoA is as below.¶
with the development of IoA, the DNS must be equipped with the capability to map capabilities to agent identity identifiers:¶
From the perspective of domain names, new domain names ought to incorporate additional hierarchical levels that convey capability-related information, beyond the basic information (such as organizations and regions) typically found in conventional domain names. The newly introduced name levels should be capable of intuitively and succinctly representing the capabilities of a specific type of agent or other distinctive attributes. For example, a domain name designated for an image processing agent might include keywords relevant to image processing, such as "...appname.ImageProcess.organizer." This approach would enable authoritative servers to directly identify and retrieve all image processing agents through domain names when other agents or users are searching for image processing agents, thereby enhancing the efficiency of agent discovery.This would enable authoritative servers to directly retrieve out all agents possessing the requisite functionality through domain names when other agents or users seek out image processing agents, thereby enhancing the efficiency of agent discovery.¶
Regarding the identifiers of AI agents, it is of paramount importance to assign a unique identity identifier to each agent to ensure precise identification and differentiation among various agents, as well as to provide a foundation for agent identity verification.¶
To accurately and comprehensively reflect agent information and states, it is necessary to construct rich resource records and ensure their real-time updates:¶
Resource records suitable for IoA should be capable of carrying extensive metadata, encompassing detailed capability descriptions, configuration parameters, load conditions, and other pertinentially valuable information about the agents. These metadata serves as an agent's "digital business card," providing other agents, users, and schedulers with a comprehensive insight into the agent's information. For example, an agent's RRset could include its processing performance, supported protocol types, and current workload, thereby assisting schedulers and other agents in making well-informed decisions.¶
Given the frequent changes in agent information, a data update mechanism is imperative to guarantee the freshness of data. Within this mechanism, subscription-push [RFC8490] , regular detection and/or periodic reporting should be employed to ensure that the data (e.g. RRset) remains up-to-date. For data with low change frequencies, such as capability descriptions and configurations, real-time updates can be adopted, pushing or reporting relevant resource records when subscribed data undergoes changes. For data with high change frequencies, such as workload and network performance, periodic updates can be utilized to to prevent adverse impacts on network and processing performance. Additionally, to prevent a large number of simultaneous data refreshes across the network, a standby mode can be configured for agents with low usage, thereby reducing network load while maintaining low power consumption.¶
Meanwhile, to gain a better understanding of requester intentions and preferences, it is recommended to incorporate additional information into DNS request messages through Extended DNS (EDNS) [RFC6891] or service-related tags labeled by recursive server or gateways.¶
As businesses keep evolving, new agents are constantly emerging, and there will be new agents registered in the Internet at any given time. Therefore, it is of vital importance to achieve automatic capability registration, discovery, and publication of agents without manual intervention. The existing DNS-SD mechanism can be enhanced by incorporating authentication and rights confirmation to effectively prevent counterfeiting and impersonation attacks during the registration and discovery of a large number of agents.¶
With the growing number of agents and increasing interaction densities, the entire resolution system must possess high performance, capable of rapidly and accurately processing a large number of concurrent query requests.¶
Given the enormous number of agents, selecting the most suitable one from a pool of agents of the same type poses a significant challenge. The DNS for IoA should be equipped with multi-dimensional dynamic scheduling capabilities. It should dynamically select the optimal resolution result based on agent resource records (including capability descriptions, geographical locations, workload, etc.), business demands obtained through EDNS or other labels in pakctes, and in conjunction with network environments and load-balance strategies to achieve appropriate resource allocation.¶
This document has no IANA actions.¶