This new method of assigning address through service providers can be
put into effect immediately and will, from the start, have the
benefit of distributing the currently centralized process of
assigning new addresses. Unfortunately, before the benefit of
reducing the size of globally-known routing destinations can be
achieved, it will be necessary to deploy an Inter-Domain routing
protocol capable of handling arbitrary network and mask pairs. Only
then will it be possible to aggregate individual class C networks
into larger blocks represented by single routing table entries.
This means that upon introduction, the new addressing allocation plan
will not in and of itself help solve the routing table size problem.
Once the new Inter-Domain routing protocol is deployed, however, an
immediate drop in the number of destinations which clients of the new
protocol must carry will occur. A detailed analysis of the magnitude
of this expected drop and the permanent reduction in rate of growth
is given in the next section.
In should also be noted that the present method of flat address
allocations imposes a large bureaucratic cost on the central address
allocation authority. For scaling reasons unrelated to address space
exhaustion or routing table overflow, this should be changed. Using
the mechanism proposed in this paper will have the fortunate side
effect of distributing the address allocation procedure, greatly
reducing the load on the central authority.
