It doesn't look like were talking about the same thing. A. Address conservation and aggregation (IPv4 and IPv6) is very important to get the most out of what we've got. Read; limit the combined routing-table to a manageable size whatever that may be. B. There seems to be widespread fear that the global routing-table will grow to a non-manageable size sooner or later regardless of the efforts under A. So the limit has to be removed. What you address below mostly belong under A (and I mostly agree), whereas I so far have focused on B. On Mon, 2005-10-17 at 13:12 -0700, Fred Baker wrote:
That is an assumption that I haven't found it necessary to make. I have concluded that there is no real debate about whether the Internet will have to change to something that gives us the ability to directly address (e.g. not behind a NAT, which imposes some "interesting" requirements at the application layer and gateways of the sort which were what the Internet came about to not need) a whole lot more things than it does today. The debate is about how and when. "when" seems pretty solidly in the 3-10 year timeframe, exactly where in that timeframe being a point of some discussion, and "how" comes down to a choice of "IPv6" or "something else".
Sure, something has to replace IPv4 sooner or later and IPv6 is almost certainly the thing. Personally I belive the most trustworthy projections points towards 2010 as the time we'll run out of addresses in V4 with an additional 2-3 years if we can manage to reclaim up to 90% of those previously allocated addressblocks which are not used or not announced to the public internet.
Fleming's IPv8 was a non-stupid idea that has a fundamental flaw in that it re-interprets parts of the IPv4 header as domain identifiers - it effectively extends the IP address by 16 bits, which is good, but does so in a way that is not backward compatible. If we could make those 16 bits be AS numbers (and ignoring for the moment the fact that we seem to need larger AS numbers), the matter follows pretty quickly. If one is going to change the header, though, giving up fragmentation as a feature sees a little tough; one may as well change the header and manage to keep the capability. One also needs to change some other protocols, such as routing AS numbers and including them in DNS records as part of the address.
For the record: You brought up IPv8. Nothing of what I've mentioned requires any change to transport protocols wether implemented on top of IPv4 or 6.
From my perspective, we are having enough good experience with IPv6 that we should simply choose that approach; there isn't a real good reason to find a different one. Yes, that means there is a long coexistence period yada yada yada. This is also true of any other fundamental network layer protocol change.
The RIRs have been trying pretty hard to make IPv6 allocations be one prefix per ISP, with truly large edge networks being treated as functionally equivalent to an ISP (PI addressing without admitting it is being done). Make the bald assertion that this is equal to one prefix per AS (they're not the same statement at all, but the number of currently assigned AS numbers exceeds the number of prefixes under discussion, so in my mind it makes a reasonable thumb-in-the-wind- guesstimate), that is a reduction of the routing table size by an order of magnitude.
I wouldn't even characterise that as being bald. Initial allocations of more than one prefix per AS should not be allowed. Further; initial allocations should differentiate between network of various sizes into separate address-blocks to simplify and promote strict prefix-filtering policies. Large networks may make arrangements with their neighbors to honor more specifics, but that shouldn't mean that the rest of the world should accept those.
If we are able to reduce the routing table size by an order of magnitude, I don't see that we have a requirement to fundamentally change the routing technology to support it. We may *want* to (and yes, I would like to, for various reasons), but that is a different assertion.
Predictions disagree. //Per