The IESG has approved the following document: - 'The A+P Approach to the IPv4 Address Shortage' (draft-ymbk-aplusp-10.txt) as an Experimental RFC This document has been reviewed in the IETF but is not the product of an IETF Working Group. The IESG contact person is Ron Bonica. A URL of this Internet Draft is: http://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/draft-ymbk-aplusp/ Technical Summary We are facing the exhaustion of the IANA IPv4 free IP address pool. Unfortunately, IPv6 is not yet deployed widely enough to fully replace IPv4, and it is unrealistic to expect that this is going to change before the depletion of IPv4 addresses. Letting hosts seamlessly communicate in an IPv4-world without assigning a unique globally routable IPv4 address to each of them is a challenging problem. This draft proposes an IPv4 address sharing scheme, treating some of the port number bits as part of an extended IPv4 address (Address plus Port, or A+P). Instead of assigning a single IPv4 address to a single customer device, we propose to extend the address field by using bits from the port number range in the TCP/UDP header as additional end point identifiers, thus leaving a reduced range of ports available to applications. This means assigning the same IPv4 address to multiple clients (e.g., CPE, mobile phones), each with its assigned port-range. In the face of IPv4 address exhaustion, the need for addresses is stronger than the need to be able to address thousands of applications on a single host. If address translation is needed, the end-user should be in control of the translation process - not some smart boxes in the core. Working Group Summary This document is not the product of a working group. Document Quality - Are there existing implementations of the protocol? Yes, one (ISC AFTR A+P support), but without dynamic port allocations and no stateless support. Other implementations to follow, one of obstacles is current status (draft). - Have a significant number of vendors indicated their plan to implement the specification? Iskratel, possibly Cisco and Juniper. - Are there any reviewers that merit special mention as having done a thorough review, e.g., one that resulted in important changes or a conclusion that the document had no substantive issues? All last version thorough reviewers are now among authors: Mohammed Boucadair (FT) Reinaldo Penno (Juniper) Personnel Ron Bonica is document shepherd _______________________________________________ IETF-Announce mailing list IETF-Announce@ietf.org https://www.ietf.org/mailman/listinfo/ietf-announce
