[AusNOG] Seeking information about ISPs' address management

[Sebastian Zander]

Dear AusNOG community,

We are network researchers at Swinburne University of Technology and
would like to find out more about how ISPs manage IP addresses
assigned to clients.

In the STING research project
(http://caia.swin.edu.au/sting/index.html), which is joint work with
Geoff Huston at APNIC, we aim to find out the rate of consuming the
remaining IPv4 addresses, and the proportion of allocated but
underutilised IPv4 address space.

Could you help us by sharing some general information about standard
industry practice regarding ISPs' address management? We can keep
information confidential if required; we only need this information
internally for our estimation process.

We are particularly interested in:
- Technologies: What technologies are mainly used for configuration:
   DHCP, PPPoE, RADIUS ?
- Static vs. dynamic: What fraction of the space is allocated
   dynamically vs. what fraction of the space is allocated statically?
- Dynamics: How often do clients change their IP addresses. What are
   typical lease times or session timeouts? Do clients request the same
   address after reboot and does the server try to honour the request?
- Allocation strategies: Are dynamic addresses given out in sequential
   order, based on hashed MAC addresses, uniformly random, or other
   strategies?

The background to this project is that, as we all know, currently nearly
all IPv4 address prefixes have been allocated. However, not all
allocated IPv4 addresses are actually used.

Information about IPv4 address usage would be useful for predicting the
likely value and costs of an international IPv4 address market,
developing strategies for the distribution of remaining IPv4 addresses,
and identifying a time frame of IPv6 deployment.

We are collecting information about used IP addresses from different
sources, e.g. active "pinging" and different passive sources. Since
significant parts of the IPv4 address space are dynamically allocated,
our sources likely over-count the number of used addresses.

Any information from you guys would be greatly appreciated!

Best regards,

Sebastian Zander, Grenville Armitage, Lachlan Andrew and Geoff Huston

-- 
Sebastian Zander
http://caia.swin.edu.au/cv/szander/