Internet Population IPv4 Address Exhaustion

Internet Population IPv4 Address Exhaustion

[Name of the supervisor]

Internet Population IPv4 Address Exhaustion

Introduction

The Internet has evolved from a small network of research machines into a world-wide network for sharing information. The importance of the Internet on commerce, industry, and education has become so profound that world leaders have labeled Internet access as a vital utility. With such a vitally important role, network researchers must ensure that the Internet is able to expand and scale to serve the needs of the generations to come. To do so, we must overcome several difficult technical obstacles, such as address space exhaustion and decreased routing scalability. From a structural standpoint, the Internet simply links networks of computers. These networks may be composed of extremely different types of machines (hosts), communication links, and underlying protocols. For example, a host on a wireless network may use radios and the 802.11g protocol to communicate with another host on a network that uses optical cables and Ethernet as the underlying protocol. These hosts may be running different operating systems, such as Windows or Linux.

Literature Review

The goal of internetworking is to allow heterogenous hosts on diverse networks to communicate with each other. The protocol that makes internetworking possible is the Internet Protocol version 4 (IPv4 ). IPv4 accomplishes this goal by providing a uniform addressing scheme. Applications use IPv4 addresses to send small groups of information, called packets, to each other. Each IPv4 packet has 4-byte sender and receiver addresses. The routers in the Internet use the destination address to forward packets towards their destination. A collection of contiguously assigned IP addresses are referred to as a prefix. Each organization that wishes to connect to the Internet must acquire one or more IPv4 prefixes. All hosts within the organization's domain must derive their addresses out of the organization's prefix ranges. Prefixes make it possible to do efficient routing since a router can use a single prefix entry to represent many machines. Without such aggregation, routers would have to store a unique entry for each of the approximately 4.3 billion possible IP addresses, which would make it impossible to forward packets fast enough to keep up with demand. While IPv4 addresses are carefully designed to ensure routing scalability, they lack any semantic value, making them difficult for humans to use and remember. Mnemonic host names eliminate this shortcoming, yet routers only understand IPv4 addresses. Accordingly, host names must be translated to IP addresses. The Domain Name System (DNS) provides this mapping scalably. As an example, when a user types www.google.com in a Web browser, the DNS will translate it to one of Google's Web servers, say 74.125.95.104, allowing communication to take place. Together, the IP and DNS are critical infrastructure for typical Internet usage. Several pressing issues surround routing and addressing that threaten the viability of the continued expansion of the Internet. The two primary ones are. We are running out of IPv4 address space: The shortage of address space in IPv4 has long been recognized by ...