Analysis of the IPv4 Address Space Delegation Structure

The Internet has grown tremendously in terms of the number of users who rely on it and the number of organizations that are connected to it. Characterizing how this growth affects its structure and topology is vitally important to determine the fundamental characteristics and limitations that must be handled, such as address space exhaustion; understanding the process of allocating and delegating address space can help to answer these questions. In this paper, we analyze BGP routing data to study the structure and growth of IPv4 address space allocation, fragmentation and usage. We explore the notion of delegation relationships among prefixes and use this information to construct an autonomous system (AS) delegation tree. We show that delegation in the Internet is not significantly correlated to the underlying topology or AS customer-provider relationships. We also analyze the fragmentation and usage of address space over a period of five years and examine prefixes that are delega...

• Type: Conference
• Year: 2007
• Where: ISCC
• Authors: Anusha Sriraman, Kevin R. B. Butler, Patrick Drew McDaniel, Padma Raghavan
• Keywords: Address Space, Address Space Exhaustion, Address Space Usage, Communications, ISCC 2007