{"draft":"draft-ymbk-aplusp-10","doc_id":"RFC6346","title":"The Address plus Port (A+P) Approach to the IPv4 Address Shortage","authors":["R. Bush, Ed."],"format":["ASCII","HTML"],"page_count":"38","pub_status":"EXPERIMENTAL","status":"EXPERIMENTAL","source":"IETF - NON WORKING GROUP","abstract":"We are facing the exhaustion of the IANA IPv4 free IP address pool.\r\nUnfortunately, IPv6 is not yet deployed widely enough to fully\r\nreplace IPv4, and it is unrealistic to expect that this is going to\r\nchange before the depletion of IPv4 addresses.  Letting hosts\r\nseamlessly communicate in an IPv4 world without assigning a unique\r\nglobally routable IPv4 address to each of them is a challenging\r\nproblem.\r\n\r\nThis document proposes an IPv4 address sharing scheme, treating some\r\nof the port number bits as part of an extended IPv4 address (Address\r\nplus Port, or A+P).  Instead of assigning a single IPv4 address to a\r\nsingle customer device, we propose to extend the address field by\r\nusing bits from the port number range in the TCP\/UDP header as\r\nadditional endpoint identifiers, thus leaving a reduced range of\r\nports available to applications.  This means assigning the same IPv4\r\naddress to multiple clients (e.g., Customer Premises Equipment (CPE),\r\nmobile phones), each with its assigned port range.  In the face of\r\nIPv4 address exhaustion, the need for addresses is stronger than the\r\nneed to be able to address thousands of applications on a single\r\nhost.  If address translation is needed, the end-user should be in\r\ncontrol of the translation process -- not some smart boxes in the\r\ncore.  This document defines an Experimental Protocol for the Internet\r\ncommunity.","pub_date":"August 2011","keywords":[],"obsoletes":[],"obsoleted_by":[],"updates":[],"updated_by":[],"see_also":[],"doi":"10.17487\/RFC6346","errata_url":null}