Policy Proposal: Limit The Address Allocation to Extend The Lifetime of IPv4 L. Jean Camp † , Rui Wang † , Xiaoyong Zhou † ljcamp@indiana.edu † , wang63@indiana.edu † , xzhou@indiana.edu † † School of Informatics, Indiana University at Bloomington April 27, 2009 Abstract IP addresses are critical resources for Internet development. The available IPv4 address pool is projected to fully allocated within 3-5 years, but the deployment of the alternative pro- tocol, IPv6, is not accelerating. Recently, several proposals have introduced new approaches to managing IPv4 allocation. However, the market proposals in particular imply fundamental changes to the nature of IPv4 address allocation. This work analyzes the allocation history of ARIN, the organization which manages address allocation in the America region. Based on the historical data and projected trends, we propose three simple management policies which can be immediately implemented with limited resources and without either significant registrar cost nor drastic modifications on current allocation strategy. We verify the effectiveness of our policies using historical data. 1 1 Introduction Internet Protocol version 4 (IPv4) [1] is the fourth revision in the development of the Internet Protocol (IP) [10], and was the first version of the protocol to be widely deployed. IP address exhaustion refers to the decreasing supply of unallocated IPv4 addresses. IPv4 exhaustion has been a concern since the 1980s when the Internet began to experience dramatic growth. Address scarcity or perceived address scarcity was a driving factor in creating and adopting several new technologies, including classful networks, CIDR addressing, Network Address Translation (NAT) and a new version of the Internet Protocol, IPv6. The transition of the Internet to IPv6 is argued to be the only practical and readily available long-term solution to IPv4 address exhaustion. As the predicted IPv4 address exhaustion approaches its final stages, most ISPs, software vendors and service providers have neither adopted nor deployed IPv6. Recent analysis shows that the unallocated IPv4 address pool will be exhausted within 3-5 years [6]. The barrier to entry on the Internet for new service providers and some class of services could become insurmountable. This is because there is the potential to lock out innovations that require routable blocks of IP addresses. To alleviate the issue, several proposals [7, 12, 13, 15] 1 This paper is a continuation of the previous WEIS work. We acknowledge it may be out of scope. 1