DUNDi™ is a peer to peer system for locating Internet gateways to telephony services. Unlike ENUM, which is strictly hierarchical since it is based on DNS, DUNDi does not enforce any particular network architecture, and the protocol is designed to adapt to whatever architecture it is given.

However, certain architectures tend to scale more efficiently than others. When considering a network architecture, there are several factors which are critical:

• Loops should be avoided whenever possible. Most loops (unless very carefully designed) can cause the cached answers to be less valuable. The presense of a loop can be detected when an answer is received which DOES NOT have the "UNAFFECTED" bit set.
• Similar numbers (e.g. same area code) should be behind the same node. Again although this is not a requirement of the protocol, placing similar numbers behind a single node will reduce the number of queries that have to made.
• Fewer nodes is better. Generally, fewer nodes is better unless limited by the bandwidth or processor of those nodes. This is especially important with the E.164 context.

This section of the web site should be updated as more best practices are discovered.