IPv4 address length technical design

William Herrin bill at herrin.us
Thu Oct 4 20:00:13 UTC 2012


On Wed, Oct 3, 2012 at 7:12 PM, Cutler James R
<james.cutler at consultant.com> wrote:
> On Oct 3, 2012, at 6:49 PM, Jimmy Hess <mysidia at gmail.com> wrote:
>> In 100 years, when we start to run out of IPv6 addresses,  possibly we
>> will have learned our lesson and done  two things:
>>
>>  (1)   Stopped  mixing the Host identification and the Network
>> identification into the same bit field;   instead  every packet gets a
>> source network address,  destination network address, AND  an
>> additional  tuple of       Source host address,   destination host
>> address;  residing in completely separate address spaces,  with  no
>> "Netmasks",  "Prefix lengths", or other comingling of  network
>> addresses and host address spaces.
>>
>> And
>>  (2)  The new protocol will use  variable-length address for the Host
>> portion, such as  used in the addresses of CLNP,  with a convention of
>> a specified length,  instead of a hardwired specific limit  that comes
>> from using a permanently  fixed-width field.
>
> I suggest that the DNS name space should be considered to be
> an "hierarchical host address space" thus satisfying (1) and making (2) moot.

I'd suggest that too, but we'd have to throw out TCP, UDP and a good
chunk of the BSD sockets API to get there.

Or did you mean use DNS as it fits in the current system, which
doesn't actually satisfy (1) at all since the layer 4 protocols
continue to build the connection identity from the layer 3 network
identity instead of the external host/service identity.

Regards,
Bill Herrin


-- 
William D. Herrin ................ herrin at dirtside.com  bill at herrin.us
3005 Crane Dr. ...................... Web: <http://bill.herrin.us/>
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