In case you put a DNS server in the satellite, so that it repliesUnderstood - it's just that the gain you have from this is quite small. DNS queries only happen the first time a host needs to resolve a name, and then again after cache expiry much later, so they account for only a tiny fraction of the traffic, and also for only a small amount of the total delay in page loads. RTT isn't really the big issue in Starlink - yes it's larger than it perhaps needs to be, and bufferbloat seems to be present, but compared to GEO, it's now in the range seen for terrestrial Internet.
instead of a DNS server on ground, the RTT is reduced by half.
The idea would be that the satellite inspects IP packets and when it
detects a DNS query, instead of forwarding the packet to ground
station, it just answers back to the sender of the query.
Nowadays, satellites (starlink included) are still transparent and are
signal repeaters, not routers processing IP packets, so doing this is
not immediate at all, but it could bring some benefits.
Yes, but the benefits are quite small.
CDNs or even datacenters (Cloud) in GEO or LEO is even more complex.
Indeed. In so many ways.
Mind though that CDNs are generally tied in with DNS nowadays,
and there's another snag: Take two users, Alice in the UK and Bob
in New Zealand - pretty much antipodean, using Starlink in
bent-pipe configuration, i.e., their traffic goes through, say,
the London gateway in the UK and the Clevedon gateway in NZ. Now
imagine both trying to resolve the same CDN hostname some time
apart, but via the same satellite DNS as the satellite has moved
from the UK to NZ in the interim. Say Alice resolves first and
gets the IP address of a CDN server in the UK. If the satellite
DNS now caches this, and Bob queries the same hostname, he gets
directed to a server in the UK literally a world away instead of
the Auckland one closest to him. So unless each satellite carries
a geolocated copy of the world's DNS entries with it and makes a
decision based on user location, you have a problem.
Regards,
David
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