[ English | Japanese ]
Back to Index Page

ACADEMIC YEAR	1999
NAME	TOMINAGA, Akihiro
TITLE	A Study on Mechanism for Global and Dynamic Management of Network Addresses
ABSTRACT	This dissertation proposes and describes the implementation of the "Automatic Address Assignment Mechanism: AAAM," a mechanism that automatically manages IP addresses in middle to large scale networks. Since IP addresses are managed in a hierarchy in AAAM, it is highly scalable, supports proper authorization and policing for management and operation, and allows for autonomous distributed processing. The subject of full automatic management of network addresses in a large scale network has never been addressed before in previous papers, and this dissertation establishes a foundation in this area. The first part of this dissertation presents a survey of existing schemes that manage IP addresses manually, and shows that IP addresses are currently managed in a hierarchy consisting of hosts, subnets, organizations, countries, and the entire world. The survey also reveals that dynamic address allocation and automatic address renumbering for subnets or organizations has not been achieved. These investigations show that individual mechanisms for host, subnet, and organization are required. First, this dissertation presents the Dynamic Host Configuration Protocol (DHCP), which was standardized by the IETF, as the mechanism for IP address allocation and configuration of individual hosts. An implementation of DHCP is described and evaluated. The implementation, which was freely distributed, passed an interoperability test, an operation test in large network, and an endurance test. Next, the Dynamic Network Configuration Protocol (DNCP) is proposed in this dissertation. DNCP supports IP address allocation and configuration of subnets. DNCP adopts the "Hierarchical Server Model" that determines a hierarchy from the network topology and manages IP addresses based on this hierarchy. Thirdly, AAAM that supports IP address allocation of organizations is proposed. AAAM uses both DNCP and DNCP+ (the improved version of DNCP) to enable IP address management in organizations and automatic address configuration in subnets. DNCP+ adopts "Hierarchical Grouping" that defines a hierarchy independent from the network topology for high scalability and stability. AAAM implements renumbering and retrieving of IP addresses. AAAM also supports authorization and policing mechanisms that are necessary for system administration. Implementations were tested in a real small network and a network emulator. Another test also proved that the utilization rate of IP addresses of AAAM is higher than that of manual allocation. It was also shown that with AAAM address were managed properly despite changes in the networks due to addition or disconnection of networks. Through evaluation tests on a network emulator, it was shown that AAAM could perform well enough for practical use. From these results it can be concluded that it is useful to manage IP addresses in a hierarchy. Finally, the dissertation concludes with discussions on issues such as the validity of the management algorithm, performance and scalability of AAAM, and possibility of global IP address management.
CONTACT	To obtain the whole paper, please contact; Akihiro Tominaga tomy@wide.ad.jp

Back to Project Home Page