Extending the address space of the Internet

Abstract

In the nearest future Internet in its current shape will have to face the problem of shortage of IPv4 addresses. IPv4 architecture reserves 32 bits for addressing purposes, which occurs not to be enough in the face of a rapid growth of the Internet. To overcome this problem, the successor of IPv4, IPv6, was designed with 128 bits of addressing space. However, deployment of IPv6 goes very slowly mainly because of the cost of transition, even if many transition mechanisms were already proposed. Therefore, it could be advantageous to explore solutions which can occur better than IPv6 in terms of deployment ease or will allow for IPv4 and IPv6 coexistance with minimal cost. This thesis presents new approach for solving a problem with lack of addresses. xIP architecture creates new address space by extending IPv4 address scheme. xIP can be incorporated as a completely new protocol or can be used as a mechanism which can improve IPv6 and IPv4 coexistance (xIP6). The common characteristics of both of the architectures are integrated routing and addressing and reusing extensive part of IPv4 world. This solution seriously decreases management cost during coexistence period and makes deployment less expensive and easier to accept by users.