IP Address Encapsulation (ipae)




Charter



Status: Concluded May, 1993 







Chair(s):







 Dave Crocker 







Description of Working Group:



The IPAE Working Group seeks to develop a capability for extending IP to 



support larger addresses, while minimizing impact on the installed base of IP 



users.  An enhancement to the current system is mandatory due to the 



limitations of the current 32-bit IP addresses.  IPAE seeks to upgrade the 



current system, rather than to replace the Internet Protocol.  The approach 



taken will be to sandwich a small addressing layer, above IP but below TCP 



or UDP, with the new layer having its own IP Protocol-ID.  This special layer 



will thereby encapsulate new, larger, globally-unique addresses for the source



and destination, as well as any other fields of information that are 



considered essential.







The specificaton effort will attend to issues of transition and coexistance, 



among unmodified ``IP'' hosts and hosts which support ``IPAE'' hosts. The 



IPAE approach will develop a framework to organize the Internet into areas 



called ``IP Addressing Commonwealths'' within which 32-bit IP addresses are 



unique and are part of a larger, globally-unique Internet addressing scheme.  



It is a goal of this effort to avoid requiring any router within a 



Commonwealth to be modified, but any host wishing full Internet connectivity 



will need to support IPAE eventually.  Further, any system wishing to support 



full IPAE addresses will need to be modified, including network management 



software.