CIDR and the evolution of the Internet

H.-W. Braun
Applied Network Research
San Diego Supercomputer Center,
University of California, San Diego

Peter S. Ford
Los Alamos National Laboratory

Yakov Rekhter
Watson Research Center, IBM Corp.

The tremendous growth of the Internet has resulted in several efforts addressing the need to be able to address and route the global public Internet. Many of these efforts call for large changes in the deployed Internet infrastructure. We believe a prudent course of action includes extending the usable life of IPv4 while evaluating the use of these new technologies. This requires incremental changes in the IPv4 routing technology base, but more importantly it will require additional coordination and management among the Internet service providers. We also believe that extending the life of IPv4 includes getting higher utilization of the IPv4 address space. Several strategies, mostly administrative in nature, are proposed to conserve the use of IP address space.