Is the need for a next generation Internet reached crisis levels?

In the coming three or four years, we will see signs that the existing Internet has outgrown its capabilities. A recent workshop from ESNet put forth the following alerts:

• IPv4 addresses provided by ARIN will soon be exhausted
• the DFZ (default-free zone) continues to grow
• as the Internet grows it places more and more stress on hardware
  forwarding tables are approaching capacity in many existing routers
• RAM issues - routing table size often exceeds router memory capacity in some routers
• CPU issues - routing table recalculations exceeding time between updates – when they fall behind, routers stop routing!

In all actuality, existing USED address space is not what is running out. Existing ALLOCATED address space is what ARIN will no longer be able to freely give out. This means that address space will likely begin to become a commodity. Many organizations, countries, businesses have large amounts of unused addresses. When they are no longer free, then it is likely that addresses will begin to be sold. This only leads to further problems, especially in how it affects address routing.

In my home, I have a few PCs and laptop which share a default route for any call outside of my personal network. This default route is provided by my ISP. It is somewhat likely that my ISP also uses a default route, at least regionally, to send all of is traffic along. At some point however, my requests are received by routers that handle traffic using routing tables. These routers exist in what is referred to as the DFZ (default-free zone). As the number of used addresses grows, the routing tables for the routers in the DFZ grow as well. This will continue to pose hardware issues for these routers, since most routers use CPU and RAM that are not ‘bleeding edge’. Since most routers are built with slower and smaller processors and memory, and routers tend to be used until they are no longer useful, the growth in size of these routing tables can cause slowdowns and outages on a global level.

Since hardware appears to be the biggest issue, then budgets for new routers need to be increased. Possibly selling some of these unused addresses will provide funding for these upgrades. In order to sell the unused addresses, they will need to be broken up into smaller blocks of addresses. This will cause additional deaggregation of addresses, which causes more and more issues for those DFZ routers. It reminds me of a dog trying to chase its tail!

Some people point to IPv6 as being the solution to most of these issues, however there does not seem to be a transition plan in place yet. For a networking technology that has been around for well more than a decade, and with writing on the wall that IPv4 is not sustainable, I am amazed that we are not better prepared. Although this crisis may not have the same impact as something like global warming, it appears that mankind is willing to wait until catastrophe occurs before taking any action.