Network: IPv4 address space utilization forecasts

Today I have found to extend my Ruby scripts to make some forecasts about the "doom" date - the date in which there will be no IPv4 prefixes available for allocations. The trend line has been approximated using the y=ax+b line (using the formulas from http://www.fourmilab.ch/hackdiet/www/subsubsection1_4_1_0_8_4.html) and extended until the total number of available prefixes is reached. The forecasted date is actually in the near future, namely end of February 2014. As one can see the approaximation is not perfect (probably the exponential approximation would fit better here) since recently the allocation line goes much higher than the trend line but this was for me the starting point. I will still observe the allocations from different registries over time and publish the results on the blog (with possible corrections to the forecasts).

One only has to take into account few things like:

• the current growth is above the trend line (mainly due to the contribution from the APNIC registry, for which the number of allocations is recently grownig much faster than in the past - one has to observe the progress in the future) - which might mean that the IPv4 prefix exhaustion date might be even closer
• there is still some number of prefixes currently reserved for the IANA but that might be released for allocations in the future
• the number of broadcasted prefixes in BGP is much lower than the allocated ones (the chart has been prepared on the basis of the number of prefixes allocated by each registry)