What is Up with IPv4 Exhaustion?

The IPv4 addresses that make up the World Wide Web are running out rapidly. To understand the problem, let’s have a look at what IPv4 exhaustion is and what has been causing the issue.

IPv4 Address Exhaustion

IP version 4, commonly known as IPv4, is the most widely deployed standard that provides 4.3 billion addresses with a subset of blocks comprising 16.8 million addresses each. The exhaustion of IPv4 addresses refers to the depletion of the pool of unallocated IPv4 addresses which has been anticipated since the 1980s.

With the exhaustion, the Internet Assigned Number Authority (IANA) has depleted its entire IPv4 pool back in February 2011. Besides this, Regional Internet Registries (RIR), which is responsible to allocate IP addresses to end users, is also depleting rapidly with only two out of five RIR left with some pools of unallocated IPv4 addresses.

The depletion, which is currently the greatest cause of concern in the networking industry, began in the 1980s, when the internet started to experience dramatic growth. Due to the large number of people with home networks, DSL modems, Wi-Fi routers, and gaming consoles, the demand for the IPv4 addresses took a sharp upward shift, which gave rise to the depletion of IPv4 pool, and resulting scarcity of the resource.

What is Being Done?

Considering the explosive rate of people connecting to the internet every year and the number of new devices being connected to the internet worldwide, the experts have come up with the NAT (Network Address Translation) technology that allows the ease of rerouting traffic in IP networks without renumbering every host. This technology has played a key role in conserving global address space allocations in the wake of IPv4 address exhaustion.

In addition to this, a newer version, Internet Protocol Version 6, commonly known as IPv6, has also been introduced. IPv6 offers a broader pool of addresses (approximately 340 trillion, trillion, trillion addresses). Also, the IPv6 is thought to be a more efficient network offering better security and interoperability for mobile networks.

Although IPv6 has been available since the 90s, not many companies or ISPs are using it. While many ISPs, MSOs (Multiple System Operators), government organizations, and corporations are devising plans for transition, the full integration of IPv6 is likely to take many, many years.

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