Flexible IP: An adaptable IP address structure and its efficient addressing scheme

Abstract

The conventional IP address is designed with fixed length and lacking of extensibility, while the demand for addresses varies greatly in different scenarios. Flexible IP (FlexIP), as a variable length IP address, proactively makes address structure flexible enough to adapt to various network cases. Different lengths of the addresses could be used to accommodate different demands. However, how to efficiently addressing with length variable addresses is still a problem to be solved. The Bloom filter-based addressing scheme appears to be an excellent candidate with the possibility of compact storage and efficient member query. In this paper, we propose an adaptable IP Address Structure, which is expected to proactively adapt various network cases under flexible address structure and make Internet Protocol agilely cover futuristic and unknown scenarios. Moreover, we propose an OBF (One Bloom filter) based addressing scheme using only one Bloom filter for FlexIP. While keeping nearly the same false positive ratio as the conventional Bloom filter-based scheme, the OBF-based scheme significantly improves the addressing efficiency. OBF-based has two key features, one is that it achieves constant, yet small IP lookup time, and another is that it is insensitive to the length of the address. Simulation results show that the addressing scheme we proposed is more suitable for FlexIP addressing than well-known schemes.