IPv6 Ignorance

Wed Sep 19 05:15:33 UTC 2012

On Sep 18, 2012, at 09:38 , Jason Baugher <jason at thebaughers.com> wrote:

> On 9/18/2012 11:01 AM, Beeman, Davis wrote:
>> Orbits may not be important to this calculation, but just doing some quick head math, I believe large skyscrapers could already have close to this concentration of addresses, if you reduce them down to flat earth surface area.  The point here is that breaking out the math based on the surface area of the earth is silly, as we do not utilize the surface of the earth in a flat manner...
>> 
>> Davis Beeman
>> 
>> 
>>> On Mon, Sep 17, 2012 at 11:27:04AM -0700, Owen DeLong wrote:
>>> 
>>>> What technology are you planning to deploy that will consume more than 2 addresses per square cm?
>>> Easy. Think volume (as in: orbit), and think um^3 for a functional
>>> computers ;)
>> I meant real-world application.
>> 
>> Orbits are limited due to the required combination of speed and altitude. There are a limited number of achievable altitudes and collision avoidance also creates interesting problems in time-slotting for orbits which are not geostationary.
>> 
>> Geostationary orbits are currently limited to one object per degree of earth surface, and even at 4x that, you could give every satellite a /48 and still not burn through a /32.
>> 
>> Owen
>> 
>> 
>> 
> What about network-based objects outside of our orbit? If we're talking about IPv6 in the long-term, I think we have to assume we'll have networked devices on the moon or at other locations in space.
> 
> Jason

The IP protocol is not well suited to space travel. As such, I think there would be a non-address based scaling limit in IPv6 for that application and a new protocol would be needed.

Owen