Subject: RFC 6346 on The Address plus Port (A+P) Approach to the IPv4 Address Shortage

From: [email-masked]
Date: Fri, 26 Aug 2011 14:49:59 -0700 (PDT)

A new Request for Comments is now available in online RFC libraries.

        RFC 6346

        Title:      The Address plus Port (A+P) 
                    Approach to the IPv4 Address Shortage 
        Author:     R. Bush, Ed.
        Status:     Experimental
        Stream:     IETF
        Date:       August 2011
        Mailbox:    [email-masked]
        Pages:      38
        Characters: 89553
        Updates/Obsoletes/SeeAlso:   None

        I-D Tag:    draft-ymbk-aplusp-10.txt

        URL:        http://www.rfc-editor.org/rfc/rfc6346.txt

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 the depletion 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 document proposes an IPv4 address sharing scheme, 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
single customer device, we propose to extend the address field by
using bits from the port number range in the TCP/UDP header as
additional endpoint identifiers, thus leaving a reduced range of
ports available to applications.  This means assigning the same IPv4
address to multiple clients (e.g., Customer Premises Equipment (CPE),
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.  This document defines an Experimental Protocol for the Internet
community.

EXPERIMENTAL: This memo defines an Experimental Protocol for the
Internet community.  It does not specify an Internet standard of any
kind. Discussion and suggestions for improvement are requested.
Distribution of this memo is unlimited.

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