Reclassification of ST (IP version 5), PIP (IP version 8) and TUBA (IP version 9) to Historic
draft-boucadair-ip-version-5-8-9-historic-00

Abstract

This document reclassifies ST (IP version 5), PIP (IP version 8) and TUBA (IP version 9) to Historic status.

Status of This Memo

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Table of Contents

• 1. Introduction
• 2. Security Considerations
• 3. IANA Considerations
• 4. Acknowledgments
• 5. References
• 5.1. Normative references
• 5.2. Informative References
• Authors' Addresses

1. Introduction

The Internet community has been mobilized in the past to agree on a strategy for the evolution of the Internet and its associated IP model (e.g., [RFC6250]). An effort, called Internet “Architecture Retreat”, has been initiated in the early 90's by the IAB (Internet Architecture Board) and IESG (Internet Engineering Steering Group) to investigate issues met by the Internet. A set of recommendations “towards the future Internet architecture” have been drawn [RFC1287].

At that time (although it may be seen as nonsense in 2016), the Internet community faced a dilemma: either choose to deliberately limit the growth of the Internet or take the risk of disrupting the network and introduce new techniques for the sake of Internet growth. In addition to the need to support real-time services, [RFC1287] acknowledged that routing information explosion and address space consumption were the most urgent problems to solve. Given small changes may require a long time to be effective, [RFC1287] advocated for a long term action plan to preserve the architectural principles of the Internet instead of implementing small changes.

Then, a group called ROAD [RFC1380] has been formed to structure the problem space and to propose some directions for future Internet. ROAD and [RFC1287] have inspired IAB to propose an action plan to overcome the alarming decrease of IP address pools and the growth of routing tables [I-D.iab-ipversion7]. Concretely, IAB recommended to deprecate the Class “A”/”B”/”C” address taxonomy, to enforce CIDR (Classless Inter-domain Routing, [RFC4632]) as a short term solution, and to get ready for the introduction of “IP version 7” (not to confuse with [RFC1475]) in a mid and long term. Once the address shortage is solved, design a routing architecture which does not assume any dependency between addresses and the underlying routing topology.

Later, the IETF (Internet Engineering Task Force) has adopted the strategy proposed by the IAB but objected to some technical choices. Particularly, the IETF rejected the recommendation on IPv7 in favour of IPv6 [RFC2460]; the reader may refer to [RFC1752] for more details. As an input to its decision-making process, the IETF formed a working group called Address Lifetime Estimation (ALE) to estimate the IPv4 address depletion date and to implicitly qualify the level of urgency to specify an alternative scheme to IPv4 addressing. For the record, ALE estimated the IPv4 address depletion date between 2005 and 2011 [RFC1752]; this projection has been confirmed by recent announcements of IANA about the depletion of global IPv4 addresses.

Various proposals have been RFCed to solve some of the problems encountered by the Internet architecture. IP version numbers have been assigned to some of them:

Decimal Keyword Version
======= ======= ========================
5       ST      ST Datagram Mode
7       TP/IX   TP/IX: The Next Internet
8       PIP     The P Internet Protocol
9       TUBA    TUBA

Given that IPv6 is a deployment reality and there are no proven deployments of the aforementioned IP versions, this document reclassifies ST ([RFC1347]), PIP ([RFC1819]) and TUBA ([RFC1621]) to Historic status.

Note that [RFC1475] is already obsoleted.

2. Security Considerations

This document does not introduce any security issues.

3. IANA Considerations

IANA is requested to deallocate the version numbers (http://www.iana.org/assignments/version-numbers/version-numbers.xhtml): 5, 7, 8, and 9.

4. Acknowledgments

TBC.

5. References

5.1. Normative references

5.2. Informative References

Authors' Addresses