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STING -- Surveying The INternet's Growth
Measuring and predicting growth in Internet
addressing, routing complexity and energy
usage
Introduction
Nearly
all IP version 4 (IPv4) address prefixes have been
allocated, yet the migration to IP version 6 (IPv6) is slow
and poorly understood. However, not all allocated IPv4
addresses are actually used. The expected consequences over
the next few years, besides an
increasing uptake of IPv6,are a new
marketplace for trading blocks of unused IPv4 address space
and increased Network Address Translation (NAT)
deployment.
Estimating the rate of
consuming IPv4 addresses, the proportion of allocated but
underutilised IPv4 address space and the actual number of
hosts (including hosts behind NATs), will
allow predicting the likely
value and costs of an international IPv4 address
market (potentially increasing the
cost of Internet service), developing strategies for distribution
of remaining IPv4 addresses, and setting the time frame of IPv6
deployment. Furthermore,
estimating changes in fragmentation
of address use, will allow identifying the
potential for overflow of "routing tables" in
core infrastructure.
Another facet of this project is the growing demand
for Internet-related electrical energy worldwide --
both in core infrastructure and end user devices. We aim to
improve current estimates of end-user consumption that are
based on unwieldy manual surveys.
Project Goals
- Develop innovative active probing and
passive monitoring techniques to study and predict daily
and multi-year changes in current use of the IPv4
address space
- Develop plausible models for the current use and
future demand of Internet addresses
- Track IPv4 address utilisation to improve
society's ability to learn lessons applicable to
IPv6 roll-out policies and guide regulators in
understanding the future market for IPv4 addresses
- Estimate the actual number of hosts by estimating how
many addresses are NATed addresses and how many hosts are
behind NATs
- Improve previous energy consumption estimates by
providing a tighter bound on the number of devices active
at any given time
As part of this project we will develop and release tools to assist in data gathering
and analysis, and publish interim
results and papers on our website. The links at the top
will take you to additional
information.
Chief Investigators
Grenville
Armitage
Lachlan Andrew
Geoff
Huston
Project Members
Sebastian
Zander
Mattia
Rossi
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This project has been made possible in part by
grants from APNIC for a project
titled "Exploring the Utilisation of IPv4
Address Space and Size of the NATed IPv4
Internet" and an ARC linkage grant with
APNIC as partner organisation for a project titled
"Tools and models for measuring and predicting
growth in internet addressing and routing
complexity".
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