This paper is concerned with a multi-domain spectral method, based on an interior penalty discontinuous Galerkin (IPDG) formulation, for the exterior Helmholtz problem truncated via an exact circular or spherical Dirichlet-to-Neumann (DtN) boundary condition. An effective iterative approach is proposed to localize the global DtN boundary condition, which facilitates the implementation of multi-domain methods, and the treatment for complex geometry of the scatterers. Under a discontinuous Galerkin formulation, the proposed method allows to use polynomial basis functions of different degree on d...