Internic address allocation policy

Tue Mar 21 13:23:23 UTC 1995

Ref:  Your note of Mon, 20 Mar 1995 14:26:03 -0500

Jeff,

>... I am very concerned about having the ISPs performing address
>allocation, particularly addressing aggregation.

There are certain *fundamental* issues that one may choose to ignore.
However, this still doesn't change the fundamental property of these
issues. Relation between address space allocation/management and
the ability of the Internet routing system to scale is *one of these
issues*.

Here is a brief recap of what had been stated on MANY occasions.

The need to accommodate routing in the growing Internet requires to
perform routing information aggregation/abstaction. Both the current
routing technology, as well as proposals for new routing technologies
(e.g. Nimrod or Unified) assume that the hierarchical routing
information aggregation/abstraction will be used as *the* fundamental
technique to deal with the growth in overhead costs of running the
routing.

For the hierarchical routing to work, addresses have to reflect *where*
in the network you are. Changing providers means you've changed where
you are, which in turn means you may need to change your addresses.

Host autoconfiguration capabilities isn't a "rocket space" science, but
would certainly greatly help to accommodate the ability to change
providers in presence of hierarchical routing.  Granted this wouldn't
address the problem of dealing with the installed based, but we are not
aware of any other alternative (except for the NAT boxes and/or
application layer gateway alternative) that wouldn't require *any*
changes to the installed base, while at the same time would accommodate
hierarchical routing  and would allow to change providers.

Noel Chiappa & Yakov Rekhter