The H Ratio for Address Assignment Efficiency

Status of this Memo This memo provides information for the Internet community. This memo does not specify an Internet standard of any kind. Distribution of this memo is unlimited. Abstract This document was submitted to the IETF IPng area in response to RFC 1550. Publication of this document does not imply acceptance by the IPng area of any ideas expressed within. Comments should be submitted to the author and/or the [email protected] mailing list. A substantial part of the "IPng" debate was devoted to the choice of an address size. A recurring concept was that of "assignment efficiency", which most people involved in the discussion expressed as a the ratio of the effective number of systems in the network over the theoretical maximum. For example, the 32 bits IP addressing plan could in theory number over 7 billions of systems; as of today, we have about 3.5 millions of addresses reported in the DNS, which would translate in an efficiency of 0.05%. Huitema [Page 1]