



DNSOP                                                              J. Ye
Internet-Draft                                                  W. Cheng
Intended status: Informational                              China Mobile
Expires: 23 April 2026                                             D. Ma
                                                                    ZDNS
                                                         20 October 2025


  Problems Statement and Requirements Analysis of DNS for Internet of
                              Agents (IoA)
          draft-ye-problems-and-requirements-of-dns-for-ioa-00

Abstract

   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.

Status of This Memo

   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
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   This Internet-Draft will expire on 23 April 2026.

Copyright Notice

   Copyright (c) 2025 IETF Trust and the persons identified as the
   document authors.  All rights reserved.










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Table of Contents

   1.  Introduction  . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .   2
     1.1.  Terminology . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .   3
     1.2.  Requirements Language . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .   3
   2.  Problem Statement . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .   3
     2.1.  Change of Mapping Objects . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .   3
     2.2.  Increase in Interaction Frequency . . . . . . . . . . . .   4
     2.3.  Upgrade of Resolution Mode  . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .   5
   3.  Requirements Analysis . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .   5
     3.1.  Capability-to-Identity Mapping Innovation . . . . . . . .   5
     3.2.  Rich Resource Records and Real-Time Update  . . . . . . .   6
     3.3.  Autonomous Capability Registration and Discovery  . . . .   7
     3.4.  High-Performance Resolution System  . . . . . . . . . . .   7
     3.5.  Multi-Dimensional Dynamic Scheduling Strategies . . . . .   7
     3.6.  Authentication and Authorization Mechanism  . . . . . . .   7
   4.  Security Considerations . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .   8
   5.  IANA Considerations . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .   8
   6.  References  . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .   8
     6.1.  Normative References  . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .   8
     6.2.  Informative References  . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .   8
   Acknowledgements  . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .   9
   Contributors  . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .   9
   Authors' Addresses  . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .   9

1.  Introduction

   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.






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   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.

1.1.  Terminology

   DNS: Domain Name System

   DNS-SD: DNS-Based Service Discovery

   EDNS: Extension Mechanisms for DNS

1.2.  Requirements Language

   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.

2.  Problem Statement

2.1.  Change of Mapping Objects

   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



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   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.

2.2.  Increase in Interaction Frequency

   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.













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   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.

2.3.  Upgrade of Resolution Mode

   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.

3.  Requirements Analysis

   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.

3.1.  Capability-to-Identity Mapping Innovation

   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



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   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.

3.2.  Rich Resource Records and Real-Time Update

   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.



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   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.

3.3.  Autonomous Capability Registration and Discovery

   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.

3.4.  High-Performance Resolution System

   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.

3.5.  Multi-Dimensional Dynamic Scheduling Strategies

   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.

3.6.  Authentication and Authorization Mechanism

   In agent networks, authentication and authorization are crucial for
   ensuring network security and reliability.  This includes verifying
   agent IDs and capabilities (e.g., resource records).  Strict identity
   authentication guarantees that only legitimate agents whose IDs are
   corresponding to their feature can access the network for
   registration.  Meanwhile, capability authentication serves to prevent
   the advertisement of false capability information, thereby ensuring
   the accuracy of information about agents.  These verifications occur
   during capabilities registration, with authoritative servers
   validating the relevant information of service providers to ensure
   their capability and qualification to provide the corresponding



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   services.  Additionally, service consumers (e.g. terminals and other
   agents) also could validate the received data to prevent tampering
   during transmission by intermediate third parties.  By establishing a
   robust authentication and authorization mechanism, a secure and
   reliable network ecosystem can be constructed for IoA.

4.  Security Considerations

   TBD.

5.  IANA Considerations

   This document has no IANA actions.

6.  References

6.1.  Normative References

   [RFC2119]  Bradner, S., "Key words for use in RFCs to Indicate
              Requirement Levels", BCP 14, RFC 2119,
              DOI 10.17487/RFC2119, March 1997,
              <https://www.rfc-editor.org/rfc/rfc2119>.

   [RFC8174]  Leiba, B., "Ambiguity of Uppercase vs Lowercase in RFC
              2119 Key Words", BCP 14, RFC 8174, DOI 10.17487/RFC8174,
              May 2017, <https://www.rfc-editor.org/rfc/rfc8174>.

6.2.  Informative References

   [RFC6763]  Cheshire, S. and M. Krochmal, "DNS-Based Service
              Discovery", RFC 6763, DOI 10.17487/RFC6763, February 2013,
              <https://www.rfc-editor.org/rfc/rfc6763>.

   [RFC8490]  Bellis, R., Cheshire, S., Dickinson, J., Dickinson, S.,
              Lemon, T., and T. Pusateri, "DNS Stateful Operations",
              RFC 8490, DOI 10.17487/RFC8490, March 2019,
              <https://www.rfc-editor.org/rfc/rfc8490>.

   [RFC6891]  Damas, J., Graff, M., and P. Vixie, "Extension Mechanisms
              for DNS (EDNS(0))", STD 75, RFC 6891,
              DOI 10.17487/RFC6891, April 2013,
              <https://www.rfc-editor.org/rfc/rfc6891>.









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Acknowledgements

Contributors

Authors' Addresses

   Jiaming Ye
   China Mobile
   Email: yejiaming@chinamobile.com


   Weiqiang Cheng
   China Mobile
   Email: chengweiqiang@chinamobile.com


   Di Ma
   ZDNS
   Email: madi@zdns.cn
































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