Introducing : Brand-new Internet Protocol "Five Fields"

FenixNBK1 · ‎12-09-2015

Hi all,

I have created a new Internet Protocol "Five Fields".

Why ?
Because IPv6 is hard to use, and I wanted to keep look & feel similar to IPv4. Problem with IPv6, is that those addresses are very hard for humans to remember, compare and visualize topologies in human brain.
IPv4 has great look & feel, but it is exhausted. So I wrote a new replacement for IP.

I did it, because I don't like to work with something long like this:
2001:db8:2e1:1a73:149f:88ff:fe81:6116

And it would be better, if we work with simpler addressing:
192.168.510.971.11

10.0.0.0.1

382.201.769.25.133

Draft spec. available.

"Five Fields" offers 0...999 in each field, in dotted decimal
notation, and includes unique features not found *anywhere else*.

- x230,000 times larger address space than IPv4 (should be enough for several hundred years, including IoT)
-Mobile TCP, allows moving Mobile Nodes between subnets, without losing connectivity. A replacement for Mobile IP. An order of magnitude simpler, and requires no access to routers and configuration-free.
-IP-VRF header extension, allows doing VRF-VPN without MPLS (and without dot1q VLANs)
-Super-lightweight, and should be faster than IPv4 or IPv6 by 1%-2%. Small overhead.
-UDP/IP overhead is 28 bytes; UDP/IPv6 overhead is 48 bytes, but UDP/IP-FF overhead is just 26 bytes ! Even shorter than the original, yay !
-Simpler to implement than IPv4/v6, because no fragmentation. MTU path discovery is the way to go.
-No broadcasts.
-No IP header checksums (done at layer 4)
-No autoconfiguration/SLAAC (this belongs to DHCP territory)
-No IGMP required (it is optional now for Multicasts)
-No Layer2 resolution. ARP-free protocol.

I believe, that it is superior to both IPv4 and IPv6, simpler than both, and intended as a replacement for both. Substantial improvement on both.

This draft specification describes various parts, the protocol itself, addressing scheme, Address Resolution Algorithm (without ARP), DNS extensions, Mobile TCP, and more...

Draft spec download here:
https://www.dropbox.com/s/tnwtsjwav8yxcho/IP-FF-2015-12-09.zip?dl=0

IP-FF is about:
o Short, human-readable addresses
o Modularization of some perceived IPv6 bloat (NDP/IGMP/MLD/IPsec/SLAAC/Flow/...)
o New features: IP-VRF and Mobile TCP, TCP Anycast.
o Optimization: UDP/IPFF combo is just 26 bytes, vs UDP/IPv6 48-bytes. Almost 50% cut in overhead. And no ARP.

With more time and polish, I plan to send it to IETF.

Best wishes,
--
-Alexey Eromenko "Technologov"

al4321@gmail.com

Philip D'Ath · ‎12-18-2015

This will simply not support the rate of expansion expected over the next 25 years.

FenixNBK1 · ‎12-19-2015

With 1000 trillion addresses ?

Even if every human on Earth gets 100,000 IoT devices, we will have some spare addresses left.

Philip D'Ath · ‎12-20-2015

I have had more of a read over your documents now. Truely an impressive effort!

From a quick look, IPv6 had its first draft RFC in 1995.

https://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc1883

So that means it has been 20 odd years so far, and it is still not universally deployed. 100's of millions of dollars wll have been sent so far by vendors writing code, creating new products, making new silicon, marketing, etc.

And their was an appetite for IPv6 as it was well understood that IPv4 was running out. It was the lack of IPv4 scale and exhaustion that really drove it.

So it is not a trivial task having an entire new IPv5 approved and adopted across the industry. Ignoring the technical merits, how would you convince the IETF and all the networking and software vendors to commit all that money again, to support something with less scale, just to make it easier on some humans? If would be far cheaper and easier to write some tools to make it easier for humans to understand IPv6 ...

If your proposal existed 20 years ago then it may have got some serious traction.

FenixNBK1 · ‎12-20-2015

Well, convincing is the hard part.

I'm working on a transition plan. It includes a very powerful NAT, called "IP-FF Babysitter", similar to NAT64 + DNS64 in concept, but more advanced. This will allow any IPFF node to browse on IPv4 Internet, through gateway.

Plus, maybe I will make some tutorial videos on IP-FF concepts, addressing and subnetting. Some education material.

-Technologov