IPv4 address exhaustion is the depletion of the pool of unallocated IPv4 addresses. Because the original Internet architecture had fewer than 4.3 billion addresses available, depletion has been anticipated since the late 1980s, when the Internet started experiencing dramatic growth. This depletion is one of the reasons for the development and deployment of its successor protocol, IPv6. IPv4 and IPv6 coexist on the Internet. The IP address space is managed globally by the Internet Assigned Numbers Authority (IANA), and by five regional Internet registries (RIRs) responsible in their designated territories for assignment to end users and local Internet registries, such as Internet service providers. The main market forces that accelerated IPv4 address depletion included the rapidly growing number of Internet users, always-on devices, and mobile devices. The anticipated shortage has been the driving factor in creating and adopting several new technologies, including network address translation (NAT), Classless Inter-Domain Routing (CIDR) in 1993, and IPv6 in 1998. The top-level exhaustion occurred on 31 January 2011. All RIRs have exhausted their address pools, except those reserved for IPv6 transition; this occurred on 15 April 2011 for the Asia-Pacific (APNIC), on 10 June 2014 for Latin America and the Caribbean (LACNIC), on 24 September 2015 for North America (ARIN), on 21 April 2017 for Africa (AfriNIC), and on 25 November 2019 for Europe, Middle East and Central Asia (RIPE NCC). These RIRs still allocate recovered addresses or addresses reserved for a special purpose. Individual ISPs still have pools of unassigned IP addresses, and could recycle addresses no longer needed by subscribers. Vint Cerf co-created TCP/IP thinking it was an experiment and has admitted he thought 32 bits was enough. Every node of an Internet Protocol (IP) network, such as a computer, router, or network printer, is assigned an IP address for each network interface, used to locate and identify the node in communications with other nodes on the network.

About this result
This page is automatically generated and may contain information that is not correct, complete, up-to-date, or relevant to your search query. The same applies to every other page on this website. Please make sure to verify the information with EPFL's official sources.
Related courses (27)
MICRO-427: Robotics for society
This project based course addresses the topics of robotics and manufacturing. The theoretical basics of robotics are introduced. Systems, specifications and performances are discussed to understand we
CS-234: Technologies for democratic society
This course will offer students a broad but hands-on introduction to technologies of human self-organization.
AR-503: Digital design and making: A critical introduction
The course introduces digital design and fabrication methods by combining the transfer of technical skills with theoretical knowledge and critical reflection. Topics include: scripting/programming for
Show more
Related publications (99)
Related concepts (14)
IPv6 address
An Internet Protocol Version 6 address (IPv6 address) is a numeric label that is used to identify and locate a network interface of a computer or a network node participating in a computer network using IPv6. IP addresses are included in the packet header to indicate the source and the destination of each packet. The IP address of the destination is used to make decisions about routing IP packets to other networks. IPv6 is the successor to the first addressing infrastructure of the Internet, Internet Protocol version 4 (IPv4).
Classless Inter-Domain Routing
Classless Inter-Domain Routing (CIDR ˈsaɪdər,_ˈsɪ-) is a method for allocating IP addresses and for IP routing. The Internet Engineering Task Force introduced CIDR in 1993 to replace the previous classful network addressing architecture on the Internet. Its goal was to slow the growth of routing tables on routers across the Internet, and to help slow the rapid exhaustion of IPv4 addresses.
Port forwarding
In computer networking, port forwarding or port mapping is an application of network address translation (NAT) that redirects a communication request from one address and port number combination to another while the packets are traversing a network gateway, such as a router or firewall. This technique is most commonly used to make services on a host residing on a protected or masqueraded (internal) network available to hosts on the opposite side of the gateway (external network), by remapping the destination IP address and port number of the communication to an internal host.
Show more

Graph Chatbot

Chat with Graph Search

Ask any question about EPFL courses, lectures, exercises, research, news, etc. or try the example questions below.

DISCLAIMER: The Graph Chatbot is not programmed to provide explicit or categorical answers to your questions. Rather, it transforms your questions into API requests that are distributed across the various IT services officially administered by EPFL. Its purpose is solely to collect and recommend relevant references to content that you can explore to help you answer your questions.