Posts Tagged IPv4

Why don’t we just reclaim unused IPv4 addresses?

Feb 3, 2011 at 16:13 · Filed under Technology ·Tagged , , , , , ,

With IANA recently allocating its last 2 /8s from the IPv4 free pool to APNIC, and about to announce automatic allocation of each of the last 5 /8s to the RIRs, the end of IPv4 is truly nigh. The RIRs’ pools will run out over the course of the next year, and that’ll be it – no more v4 addresses left.

However, why can’t we just reclaim unused and reserved addresses? Surely there’s a few legacy /8s assigned to organisations that could be clawed back? Couldn’t we check whether assignments are being used and reclaim ones that aren’t? What about the large, former-class-E space? Couldn’t one or more of those buy a good bit of time for IPv4?

This post examines these questions and largely concludes “no”.  The issues with IPv4 depletion are simply fundamental to its (fixed) size. The IPv4 address space simply is too small to accommodate the growth of the current internet, and reclamation is unlikely to buy any useful time.

NAT could buy some amount of time, but even the NAT space seems like it may be too small for developed-world levels of technology to be deployed globally.

“Unused” address space

If you were to “ping” or otherwise probe all the assigned address space, you might find significant chunks of it are not reachable from the public, global internet. E.g. the US military has large assignments which are not advertised, as do other organisations. So why don’t we reclaim those assignments, let the organisations switch to NAT, and make them available?

Well, just because address-space is not globally reachable does not mean it is not being used for inter-networking. The criteria for IPv4 assignments has always been a need for globally unique address-space, not a need for global reachability. Many organisations have need for private inter-networking with other organisations (financial organisations notably), which is hard to do in a scalable way with NAT. So such use is justified, and we can’t really reclaim it.

Former Class-E Space

What about the 16 /8s that comprise the former Class-E space? Even ignoring 255/8, which likely will never be useable, that’s still a fairly big chunk of address space – more than 5% of the total 32bit address space. Why not re-use that, surely that would make a big difference?

Unfortunately there are major challenges to using this address space. It has long been classed as “Reserved – for future use”, and remains so. A lot of networking code that deals with forwarding or routing packets checks that addresses are not reserved. This means if anyone were assigned addresses from this range they would find they would not be able to communicate with much of the rest of the internet. Even if most of the internet upgraded their software to fix this, the poor user would still find some sites were unreachable. The sites with the old software might not ever notice there was a problem, and might not even have an economic incentive to upgrade (“you want me risk causing problems for my network with an upgrade, to fix problems only you and a few others have?”)!

If we are forced to assign from the former-Class-E space, it will be a sign that the IPv6 rollout is perhaps in serious trouble.

The core of the problem: The size of the IPv4 address space

The nub of the problem is that IPv4 is simply too small.

IPv4 has 32 bit addresses, giving 4.29G addresses, roughly divided into 256 pieces, called /8s, for top-level assignments. Of this space, 18 /8s are reserved in their entirety for special purposes  and will never be useful for general assignment; 1 /8 is reserved  for private-networking; 16 /8s are tied up in the former Class-E space and likely not useful, as above. There are other reservations across the address space, but in smaller quantities that we can ignore in impact here. That still means 221 /8s = 3.71G address – 86% of the total address space – is available for global assignment (and the private 10/8 takes some pressure off that global space). This is equivalent to a 31.788 bit address space.

Now, average daily assignment rates have been running at above 10 /8s per year, for 2010, and approached 15 /8s towards the end. This means any reclamation effort has to recover at least 15 /8s  per year just to break even on 2010’s growth. That’s 5.9% of the total IPv4 address space, or 6.8% of the assignable address space. Is it feasible to be able to reclaim that much address space? Even if there were low-hanging fruit to cover the first year of new demand, what about there-after? Worse, demand for address space has been growing supra-linearly, particularly in Asia and Latin America. So it seems highly unlikely that any reclamation project can buy anything more than a years worth of time (and reclamation itself takes time).

Seen another way, there are approaching 7G people in the world – 6.9G in 2010. Giving 1 address for every 1.86 people (in 2010). Even if we reclaimed old-Class-E, IPv4 still only provides 3.98G = 231.89 addresses, or 1 address for every 1.73 people.

Worse we can not use the address space with perfect efficiency. Because of the need for hierarchical assignment, some space will be wasted – effectively some bits of addresses are lost to overheads such as routing. Empirical data suggests a HD-ratio of 0.86 is the best achievable assignment density. This means that with the 3.98G assignable addresses with class-E reclaim, only 3.98G0.86 = 2(31.89*0.86) = 2(27.43) = 181M will actually be useable as end-host addresses, giving 1 IPv4 address for every 38 people (in 2010)!

Yet, people in the developed world today surely use multiple IP addresses per person. They have personal computers at work and home, eBook readers, mobile phones, etc. All of which depend on numerous servers which require further IP addresses. The people in the developing world surely aspire to similar standards of technology. If we assume the density of IP/person is heavily skewed towards the reported 20% of the world population who manage to earn more than $10/day, then that means that today each IP address is being used by around 7 people. If the skew is heavily biased towards just 10% of the world population, the figure would be around 4 people per address. It’d be interesting to get precise figures for this.

Can NAT save us?

Many organisations are likely to try buy time with NAT. But how much? NAT gives us only 16 extra bits. Assuming they were free bits, that would give us a 2(27.43+16) bit address space = 11,850G addresses. On the face of it seems like this would do for quite a while. It’d allow 1 connection at a time between every host, which is still sufficient to allow all processes to communicate with each other if a higher-level multiplexer protocol is agreed on (it’d be HTTP based, given current trends).

Unfortunately though, this won’t work with TCP, as it is. When TCP closes a connection it will go into a TIME_WAIT state, where it will not allow connections from the same (src,dst) 4-tuple. TCP remains in this state for 1 or 2 minutes on most implementations. Which means you need at least 60 ports if you want to be able to open connections to same host on average 1/s (you probably don’t want to generally, but think of bursts). For every 0.5s, you need 120 ports.

In practical terms, this means probably at least 8 bits of the port-space need to be reserved for TCP on each host. Leaving 8 bits to extend the address space with. This gives 2(27.43+8) = 46G addresses = 6.7 addresses/2010-person (NB: addresses/person instead of the person/address used above) = 0.15 people/address.

This though assumes the HD-ratio assignment-density model applies only over the scale of the IP addresses, and that the borrowed port-space will be allocated with near perfect efficiency. If that were not to be the case, if instead the extra port space also were subject to the HD-ratio model, then the numbers become instead (2(31.89+8))0.86 = 2(31.89+8)*0.86 = 21.3G addresses & 3 addresses/2010-person = 0.32 people/address.

Is that enough? Certainly for a time. It doesn’t seem a comfortable margin though, particularly as it may require some further changes to end-hosts to be truly workable.

Errata

This blog post almost certainly has mistakes, possibly significant. Those noted so far, and any other significant edits:

  • Missing “not”: those assigned old-class-E addresses would not be able to communicate with much of rest of internet
  • Added people/address numbers in last section, for ease of comparison with previous figures.

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Making the Internet Scale Through NAT

Feb 12, 2010 at 20:45 · Filed under Technology ·Tagged , , , , , , , , , , , ,

(just want to dump this here for future reference)

It’s widely acknowledged that the internet has a scaling problem ahead of it, and an even more imminent addressing problem. The core of internet routing is completely exposed to peripheral growth in mobile/multihomed leaf networks. Various groups are looking at solutions. The IRTF’s RRG has been discussing various solutions. The IETF have a LISP WG developing one particular solution, which is quite advanced.

The essential, common idea is to split an internet address into 2 distinct part, the “locator” and the “ID” of the actual host. The core routing fabric of the internet then needs only to be concerned with routing to “locator” addresses. Figuring out how to map onward to the (presumably far more numerous and/or less aggregatable) “ID” of the specific end-host to deliver to is then a question that need only concern a boundary layer between the core of the internet and the end-hosts. There are a whole bunch of details here (including the thorny question of what exactly the “ID” is in terms of scope and semantics) which we’ll try skip over as much as possible for fear of getting bogged down in them. We will note that some proposals, in order to be as transparent and invisible to end-host transport protocols as possible, use a “map and encap” approach – effectively tunneling packets over the core of the internet. Some other proposals use a NAT-like approach, like Six-One or GSE, with routers translating from inside to outside. Most proposals come with reasonable amounts of state, some proposals appear to have quite complex architectures and/or control planes. E.g. LISP in particular seems quite complex, relative to the “dumb” internet architecture we’re used to, as seems to try to solve every possible IP multi-homing and mobile-IP problem known to man. Some proposals also rely on IPv6 deployment.

Somewhat related proposals are shim6, which adds multi-homing capable “shim” layer in between IP and transport protocols like TCP (or “Upper Layer Protocols” / ULPs), and MultiPath-TCP (MPTCP), which aims to add multi-pathing extensions to TCP. Shim6 adds a small, additional state machine to whatever state machines the ULPs require, and is not backwards compatible with non-shimmed hosts (which isn’t a great problem of itself). Shim6 requires IPv6. MPTCP is still in a very early stage, and does not appear to have described any possible proposals yet.

Not too infrequently well-engineered solutions to some problem may not quite have a high enough unilateral benefit/cost ratio  for that solution to enjoy widespread adoption. Then cheap, quick hacks that address the immediate problem without causing too many problem can win out. The clear example in the IP world being NAT. It is therefore interesting to consider what will happen if none of the solutions currently being engineer, mentioned above, gain traction.

E.g. there are quite reasonable solutions which are IPv6 specific, and IPv6 is not exactly setting the world alight. There are other proposals which are v4/v6 agnostic, but require a significant amount of bilateral deployment to be useful, e.g. between ISP and customers, and do not have any obvious immediate advantages to most parties. Etc. So if, for whatever reasons, cost/benefit ratio means none of these solutions are rolled out, and the internet stays effectively v4-only for long enough, then the following will happen:

  1. Use of NAT will become ever more common, as pressure on IPv4 addresses increases
  2. As the use of NAT increases, the pressure on the transport layer port space (now press-ganged into service as an additional cross-host flow identifier) will increase, causing noticeable problems to end-user applications.
  3. As NAT flow-ID resources become ever more precious, so applications will become more careful to multiplex application protocols over available connections.
  4. However, with increased internet growth, even NAT will become more and more a luxury, and so ever more applications will be forced to rely on application layer proxies, to allow greater concentration of applications to public IP connections – at which stage you no longer have an internet.

The primary problems in this scenario are:

  • The transport protocol’s port number space has been repurposed as a cross-host flow-ID
  • That port number space is far too constraining for this purpose, as it’s just 2 bytes

The quickest hack fix is to extend the transport IDs. With TCP this is relatively easy to do, by defining a new TCP option. E.g. say we add a 2 * 4-byte host ID option, one ID for src, one for the dst. When replying to a packet that carried the option, you would set the dst to the received src, obviously. This would give NAT concentrators an additional number space to help associate packets with flows and the right NAT mappings.

This only fixes things for TCP, plus the space in the TCP header for options is becoming quite crowded and it’s not always possible to fit another 2*4+2 bytes in (properly aligned). IP also has an option mechanism, so we could define the option for IP and it would work for all IP protocols. However, low level router designers yelp in disgust at such suggestions, as they dislike having to parse out variably placed fields in HDL; indeed it is common for high-speed hardware routers to punt packets with IP options out to a slow, software data-path. The remaining possibility is a Shim style layer, i.e. in between IP and the ULPs, but that has 0 chance of graceful fallback compatibility with existing transports.

Let’s go with the IP option header as the least worst choice. It might lead to slower connectivity, but then again if your choice is between “no connectivity, because a NAT box in the middle is maxed out” and “slow connectivity, but connectivity still” then its better than nothing. Further, if such use of an IP option became wide-spread you can bet the hardware designers would eventually hold their noses and figure out a way to make common case forwarding fast even in its presence – only NAT concentrators would need to care about it.

Ok, so where are we now? We’ve got an IP option that adds 2 secondary host IDs to the IP header, thus allowing NAT concentrators to work better. Further, NAT concentrators could now even be stateless when it comes to processing packets that have this option. All it has to do is copy the dst address from the option into the IP header dst. This would allow the NATed hosts to be reachable from the outside world! The IDs don’t even have to be 4 byte each, per se.

Essentially you now have split addressing into 2. You could think of it as a split in terms of “internet” or “global network ID” and “end-host” ID, a bit like 6-to-1 or other older proposals I can’t remember the name of now, however it’s better to think of it as being 2 different addressing “scopes”:

  • The current forwarding scope, i.e. the IP header src/dst
  • The next forwarding scope, i.e. the option src/dst, when the the dst differs from the current scope dst

NAT boxes now become forwarding-scope context change points. End-host addressing in a sense can be thought of as end-host@concentrator. Note that the common, core scope of the internet can be blissfully unbothered by any details of the end-host number space. Indeed, if there’s no need for cross-scope communication then they can even use different addressing technologies, e.g. one IPv4 the other IPv6 (with some modification to the “copy address” scheme above).

Note that the end-host IDs no longer need be unique, e.g. 10.0.0.1@concentrator1 can be a different host from 10.0.0.1@concentrator2. In an IPv4 world, obviously the end-host IDs (or outside/non-core scope IDs) would not be globally unique. However, this scheme has benefits even with globally unique addresses, e.g. public-IP@concentrator still is beneficial because it would allow the core internet to not have to carry the prefixes for stub/leaf public IP prefixes.

You could take it a bit further and allow for prepending of scopes in this option, so you have a stack of scopes – like the label stack in MPLS – if desired. This would allow a multi-layered onion of forwarding: end-host@inner@outer. Probably not needed though.

What do we have now:

  • An IP option that adds a secondary addressing scope to packet
  • A 2-layer system of forwarding, extendible to n-layer
  • Decoupling of internet ID space from end-host ID space
  • Compatible with existing ULPs
  • Backwards compatible with IPv4 for at least some use cases
  • Allows NAT to scale
  • Relatively minor extension to existing, widely accepted and deployed NAT architecture
  • Allows scalable use of PI addressing
  • No per-connection signalling required
  • Minimal state

On the last point, the system clearly is not dynamic, as Shim6 tries to be. However, if the problem being solved is provider independence in the sense of being able to change providers without having to renumber internally, then this hack is adequate. Further, even if the reachability of network@concentrator is not advertised to the internet, the reachability of concentrator must be advertised at least. So there is some potential for further layering of reachability mechanisms onto this scheme.

No doubt most readers are thinking “You’re clearly on crack“. Which is what I’d have thought if I’d read the above a year or 5 ago. However, there seems to be a high-level of inertia on today’s internet for solving the addressing crunch through NAT. There seems to be little incentive to deploy IPv6. IPv6 also doesn’t solve multi-homing or routing scalability, the solutions for which all have complexity and/or compatibility issues to varying degrees. Therefore I think it is at least worth considering what happens if the internet sticks with IPv4 and NAT even as the IPv4 addressing crunch bites.

As I show above it is at least plausible to think there may be schemes that are compatible with IPv4 and allow the internet to scale up, which can likely be extended later to allow general connectivity across the NAT/scope boundaries, still with a level of backwards compatibility. Further, this scheme does not require any dynamic state or signalling protocols, beyond initial administrative setup. However, the scheme does allow for future augmentation to add dynamic behaviours.

In short, schemes can be devised which, while not solving every problem immediately, can deliver incremental benefits, by solving just a few pressing problems first and being extendible to the remaining problems over time. It’s at least worth thinking about them.

[Corrections for typos, nits and outright crack-headedness would be appreciated, as well as any comments]

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