A Better Internet Without Ip Addresses
A BETTER INTERNET WITHOUT IP ADDRESSES Craig A. Shue Submitted to the faculty of the University Graduate School in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree Doctor of Philosophy in the Department of Computer Science, Indiana University May 2009 ii Accepted by the Graduate Faculty, Indiana University, in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy. Doctoral Committee Minaxi Gupta, Ph.D. Randall Bramley, Ph.D. Geoffrey Fox, Ph.D. Raquel Hill, Ph.D. April 21, 2009 iii Craig A. Shue A BETTER INTERNET WITHOUT IP ADDRESSES The Internet has evolved from a small network of research machines into a world-wide network for sharing information. The importance of the Internet on commerce, industry, and education has become so profound that world leaders have labeled Internet access as a utility vital to civilization. With such a vitally important role, network researchers must ensure that the Internet is able to expand and scale to serve the needs of the generations to come. To do so, we must overcome two of the most pressing technical obstacles. First, we are rapidly running out of available addresses to identify machines on the Internet. The Internet Protocol version 4, or simply IPv4, can uniquely identify 4.3 billion machines. However, about 88% of the IPv4 address space has been assigned with projections of exhaustion in as little as two years. The second major hurdle is that routers, which forward packets from a source machine to a destination, may soon not be able to store all the required packet forwarding state while still providing expedient packet delivery.
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