mornin' tli,
You might not have noticed, but there seems to be a shortage of IPv4... Thanks, I’ve been noticing since 1991.
i thought gert was old enough to remember you led the CIDR fight as i know you are aware that non-trivial blocks of ipv4 space are no longer available from registries (except maybe afrinic), i do not understand how you think you are going to solve this at layer nine. how much space do you think you are going to need in a year, five, ten, ...?
Agencies are using prefixes from their existing allocations. Right now, that’s not problematic because their needs today are tiny. However, this builds momentum in a direction away from aggregation. As they hit address space constraints, they are then likely to resort to private IPv4 (RFC 1918) addressing.
i am starting, only starting, to understand where you're coming from
We can help them by giving them a clear path to a different alternative.
i sympathise with your wanting to avoid a trajectory which de-aggregates agencies' existing space. not a good start. i am trying to understand how you think this is going to scale. and what will intra-solar-system routing look like in 50 years? bgp-like? link state, with volatile links? we made the mistake of hacking addressing without routing once already.
why would anyone want to build this with IPv4? Bandwidth is extremely constrained. Agencies may choose to optimize for performance.
do you really think v6 header size is that big a problem? if you could use ipv6, i can imagine the rir system finding a way to give you a big chunk or whatever. it would likely take some discussion, but it leaves the deaggregation problem on your side of the net. otoh, there are some public service oriented folk holding large blocks of ipv4 space who might be willing to negoriate, e.g. ARDC. perhaps i am overly concerned by how this will scale in decades, with many agencies, countries, planets and moons, ... i can't help thinking it is déjà vu all over again. i do not like repeating the bad parts of history, only the good ones.. randy