RE: regionalized addresses, RIRs, and table size

["Ray Plzak" <plzak@arin.net>]

The idea of geographic addressing based on population was briefly
discussed in the RIPE region.  The primary discussion has been between
two proposals - the IANA allocates a /3 to the RIRs to jointly
administer on a global basis versus the IANA allocates sufficiently
large prefixes to each RIR for regional allocation.

Ray

> -----Original Message-----
> From: Iljitsch van Beijnum [mailto:iljitsch@muada.com] 
> Sent: Sunday, October 12, 2003 4:22 PM
> To: Ray Plzak
> Cc: multi6@ops.ietf.org
> Subject: Re: regionalized addresses, RIRs, and table size
> 
> 
> On zondag, okt 12, 2003, at 17:23 Europe/Amsterdam, Ray Plzak wrote:
> 
> [geographic addressing]
> 
> > This has been discussed in regard to the minimum allocation from the
> > IANA to the RIRs in all the regions.  There has been no conclusion
> > reached in regards to a policy, which by the way would be a global
> > policy and would have to pass through the ASO Address 
> Council and the
> > ICANN Board.
> 
> I'm unaware of what has been discussed in that forum, but geographic 
> addressing only makes sense if it enables geographic 
> aggregation, which 
> isn't an entirely trivial excercise.
> 
> Geographic addressing has been discussed extensively on a non-IETF 
> mailinglist about multihoming in IPv6 and our conclusion was 
> that a /16 
> for geographic addressing where the allocation of addresses 
> is based on 
> population would work well. The minimum "allocation" would be 
> a /32 for 
> a region with around 350.000 inhabitants, but since such a 
> region isn't 
> an addressable entity in network terms these blocks wouldn't be 
> allocated in the current sense; this type of address space would have 
> to be held by the RIRs and be directly assigned to end-users based on 
> their location. (Obviously the "paper work" could still be done by an 
> intermediary such as an ISP so the RIR part could be fully automated.)
> 
> A /24 (presumably out of 6bone space) could be used in a field 
> experiment, but /48s would run out fairly quick in network-intensive 
> areas such as Silicon Valley with not much more than one /48 per 2500 
> inhabitants while the current usage of AS numbers is around one in 
> 30000 for Europe and the US.
> 
> More than a /16 would be unworkable as presumably flat 
> routing would be 
> needed in cities and even with a /16 that means flat routing for 
> millions of /48s in the largest metropolitan areas.
>