Address reuse in the Internet, adjourning or suspending the adoption of IP next generation?

摘要

Since a couple of years, the Internet has grown immensely. Nowadays the Internet is no longer a communication tool dedicated to universities and governments for research purposes and low cost communication. In a period of more or less 5 years, the Internet has become a very familiar and popular tool. However, the growth in the number of Internet users, the number of hosts connected to the World Wide Web, and the number of companies establishing a Web presence has brought to light a weakness in the Internet Protocol (IP v4): the network address space is not adequate to sustain its continued growth into the next millenium. This paper explores an emerging architecture of the Internet based on Network Address Translation (NAT) and the alternatives thereof. To this end, it presents and compares various mechanisms for alleviating the network address shortage by separating public and private address spaces. The benefits and shortcomings of NAT are described, as well as a new network address reuse mechanism known as Realm Specific IP (RSIP). Furthermore, this papers will extensively describe improvements to the latter mechanism which is becoming well popular. Finally, the paper explains how network address reuse technologies are about to brake to the adoption of the newly designed Internet Protocol, IP version 6.