Subject: I-D Action:draft-ymbk-aplusp-04.txt

From: [email-masked]
Date: Mon, 13 Jul 2009 16:00:01 -0700 (PDT)

A New Internet-Draft is available from the on-line Internet-Drafts directories.

	Title           : The A+P Approach to the IPv4 Address Shortage
	Author(s)       : R. Bush
	Filename        : draft-ymbk-aplusp-04.txt
	Pages           : 31
	Date            : 2009-07-13

We are facing the exhaustion of the IANA IPv4 free IP address pool.
Unfortunately, IPv6 is not yet deployed widely enough to fully
replace IPv4, and it is unrealistic to expect that this is going to
change before we run out of IPv4 addresses.  Letting hosts seamlessly
communicate in an IPv4-world without assigning a unique globally
routable IPv4 address to each of them is a challenging problem.

This draft discusses the possibility of address sharing by treating
some of the port number bits as part of an extended IPv4 address
(Address plus Port, or A+P).  Instead of assigning a single IPv4
address to a customer device, we propose to extended the address by
"stealing" bits from the port number in the TCP/UDP header, leaving
the applications a reduced range of ports.  This means assigning the
same IPv4 address to multiple clients (e.g., CPE's, mobile phones),
each with its assigned port-range.  In the face of IPv4 address
exhaustion, the need for addresses is stronger than the need to be
able to address thousands of applications on a single host.  If
address translation is needed, the end-user should be in control of
the translation process - not some smart boxes in the core.

A URL for this Internet-Draft is:
http://www.ietf.org/internet-drafts/draft-ymbk-aplusp-04.txt

Internet-Drafts are also available by anonymous FTP at:
ftp://ftp.ietf.org/internet-drafts/

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