The following is a surprise coming up the horizon. It makes use of the basic IPv4 standard RFC791 to resolve the issue of IPv4 public address shortage. Since it may sound like out-of-the-blue, allow me to state that it has been in private reviews at the highest levels of responsible organizations without getting a shot at yet. So, please enjoy the information.

We came upon a scheme that can expand each public IPv4 address by 256M (Million) fold without affecting the current Internet. A proposal called EzIP (phonetic for Easy IPv4) has been submitted to IETF:

https://tools.ietf.org/html/draft-chen-ati-adaptive-ipv4-add...

Essentially, among other benefits, EzIP can establish a sub-Internet capable of serving an area with up to 256M IoTs, from just one IPv4 address. This is bigger than the largest city (Tokyo metro) and 75% of the countries. This can realize the CIR (Country-based Internet Registry) model proposed by ITU a few years ago stealthily even without setting up a CIR organization. If a government is not interested in this resources, private enterprises can make use of it to provide "local" Internet service in parallel to the current "global" Internet model, very much like the Independent telephone companies in the PSTN industry.

The current Internet then becomes the backbone / infrastructure / skeleton for interconnecting these sub-Internets, yet only for carrying inter sub-Internet traffic, very similar as the electric grid supporting islands of renewable energy generated by individual homes and businesses. Consequently, there will be a lot of spare IPv4 addresses for quite sometime to come.

In terms of the IP address length, the basic EzIP header format proposes to double it by utilizing the Option Word mechanism in the IP Header to make the overall system 64 bits. It is just as well to make the Option Word to carry longer bits like up to 96 bits so that the overall address system becomes 128 bit, in the same class as IPv6 while totally staying IPv4 within conformance.

Then, much of the efforts in developing and deploying IPv6 are no longer needed.

Thoughts and comments will be much appreciated.

Abe (2018-09-15 12:48)