Address Lifetime Expectations (ale) Charter

NOTE: This charter is accurate as of the 31st IETF Meeting in San Jose. It may now be out-of-date. (Consider this a "snapshot" of the working group from that meeting.) Up-to-date charters for all active working groups can be found elsewhere in this Web server.

Chair(s)

Frank Solensky <solensky@ftp.com>
Tony Li <tli@cisco.com>

IP: Next Generation Area Director(s):

Scott Bradner <sob@harvard.edu>
Allison Mankin <mankin@isi.edu>

Mailing List Information

General Discussion:ipv4-ale@ftp.com
To Subscribe: ipv4-ale-request@ftp.com
Archive: research.ftp.com:pub/ale/

Description of Working Group

The primary purpose of the Address Lifetime Expectations Working Group is to develop an estimate for the remaining lifetime of the IPv4 address space based on currently known and available technologies. The members of the working group will consider whether more stringent address allocation and utilization policies might provide additional time and, if so, recommend such policies. The working group will also investigate whether it is worthwhile to mount a serious effort to reclaim addresses and/or to renumber significant portions of the Internet. It will also weigh the benefit of other potential options against their expected cost and notify the responsible working groups or area directors of those proposals the ALE group considers worthy of further attention.

The working group will have several ongoing activities which will result in reports to the IETF community and the IPng Area Directors. One ongoing activity is to produce monthly predictions of the address space exhaustion timeframe, assessing the accuracy of these predictions and the data on which they are based. The group will also project the impact of various policy compliance data and possible policy recommendations.

Another ongoing activity is to monitor the perceived utilization of address space and identify sources of poor utilization, set address utilization goals and to itemize possible policies to improve utilization.

The group will also monitor the number of routes present in the Internet backbones, and identify sources of poor aggregation within the network, (in conjunction with the BGP Deployment Working Group), and make necessary recommendations to insure continued operations.

Goals and Milestones

Nov 93: Coordinate with existing efforts in this area. For example, those of the IEPG and the CIDR Deployment Working Group. The result is an allocation of tasks agreed among the efforts.
Done: Make presentation to the IETF plenary on the current status of the address space utilization.
Apr 94: In cooperation with the BGP Deployment Working Group, produce a report on the status of address aggregation, including additional guidelines/strategies, if necessary.
Jul 94: Produce a report on the status of address space utilization, including goals and guidelines for improving address space utilization. Summarize this report during the IETF plenary.