[routing-wg] IPv6 Routing Recommendations

On Tue, Apr 27, 2010 at 11:29:52AM +0100, David Freedman wrote:
> Could we not use current ipv4 deaggregation + growth to make some
> estimations about what could happen with ipv6?

Yes, and it has been done at least once, about 4 years ago; here's a
presentation, developed by Jason Schiller and me for NANOG in June, 2006
given again again by me at RIPE in October, 2006:

  http://www.vaf.net/prezos/ripe53.ppt

a shorter and more recent version that I gave at the NORDUNET conference
in September, 2009, is also available at:

  http://www.vaf.net/prezos/nordunet2009-vaf.ppt

The first presentation explains more about how we determined the current
deaggregation rate (intentional vs. ignorance) and what assumptions we
made about projecting that forward. The second presentation is a little
more up-to-date, though some of the numbers in both of them lag the
real-world observations on both global and large-ISP-local routing table
prefix counts; it's probably safe to assume that the real-world numbers
for IPv4 are higher than the projections while those for ipv6 are lower
than the projections (for example, the predicted number of IPv4 routes
for June, 2011 was 285,064; the actual number from last week's CIDR report
was 321,746).

These presentations stress that projections, by nature, are somewhat
speculative. The also stress that the only way out of this mess is a change
in the Internet addressing and routing architecture, probably involving some
sort of identifier/locator separation. Sure, you can try to influence behavior
through address allocation policies and maybe doing so can help mitigate the
short-term problem while a long-term solution is pursued, but that approach
is doomed to failure in the face of customer demand for multi-homing, traffic
engineering, and address space portability.

	--Vince