Address Lifetime Expectations
charter-ietf-ale-01

The primary purpose of the Address Lifetime Expectations Working Group
is to develop an estimate for the remaining lifetime of the IPv4
address space based on currently known and available technologies. The
members of the working group will consider whether more stringent
address allocation and utilization policies might provide additional
time and, if so, recommend such policies. The working group will also
investigate whether it is worthwhile to mount a serious effort to
reclaim addresses and/or to renumber significant portions of the
Internet. It will also weigh the benefit of other potential options
against their expected cost and notify the responsible working groups
or area directors of those proposals the ALE group considers worthy of
further attention.

The working group will have several ongoing activities which will
result in reports to the IETF community and the IPng Area Directors.
One ongoing activity is to produce monthly predictions of the address
space exhaustion timeframe, assessing the accuracy of these predictions
and the data on which they are based. The group will also project the
impact of various policy compliance data and possible policy
recommendations.

Another ongoing activity is to monitor the perceived utilization of
address space and identify sources of poor utilization, set address
utilization goals and to itemize possible policies to improve
utilization.

The group will also monitor the number of routes present in the
Internet backbones, and identify sources of poor aggregation within the
network, (in conjunction with the BGP Deployment Working Group), and make
necessary recommendations to insure continued operations.