A growth-based address allocation scheme for IPv6

Abstract

IP address allocation policies significantly impact the Internet infrastructure, affecting many parties such as router manufacturers, ISPs, and end users. An address allocation policy can also directly affect the performance of the Internet. For example, address fragmentation, a key problem in IPv4, degrades address lookup performance in routers. Thus, a well-designed address allocation policy needs to minimize fragmentation while using the address space efficiently. This paper attempts to quantify the performance of address allocation policies by modeling key features that lead to fragmentation and inefficient address space usage. Our main contributions are: (i) we identify a drawback of the current IPv6 address allocation policy, which treats all entities uniformly, (ii) we propose a scheme that takes future growth rate into account for allocations, and (iii) an analytical model for measuring the efficiency of allocation schemes, allowing us to quantify the improvement our proposal offers over the current scheme. We believe that a quantitative study of allocation policies is timely since IPv6 address allocation is just beginning in earnest. © IFIP International Federation for Information Processing 2005.