LIR Working Group

Summary of the discussion on the "IPv6 Address Allocation and Assignment Global Policy Draft" during the LIR Working Group Session at RIPE-41

Although many of those attending the working group had read the published
draft,

|            IPv6 Address Allocation and Assignment Global Policy
|                         Draft of December, 22 2001
|                             Version 2001-12-22
|                                    APNIC
|                                    ARIN
|                                 RIPE - NCC

we started this session with a presentation by Mirjam Kuehne from the RIPE NCC
(http://www.ripe.net/ripe/meetings/archive/ripe-41/presentations/ipv6-mir/)
which summarised the main points of the current document.

Most of the discussion centered on section 5.2 of the draft related to the
Initial Allocation Criteria and Initial Allocation Size

| 5.2.1.  Initial allocation criteria
| 
|    A requesting organization can receive an initial allocation by
|    demonstrating that it has an immediate (i.e., within next three
|    months) requirement for at least a /36 prefix.  That is, immediately
|    after the allocation, the organization will have 776 or more sites in
|    need of address assignments.  776 is the number of /48 address blocks
|    that can be assigned out of a /36 address block to achieve an HD-
|    Ratio of 0.8.  The HD-Ratio is an address allocation utilization
|    metric proposed in RFC 3194 as an adaptation of the H-Ratio
|    originally defined in [RFC1715].  (See also Section 5.3.3.)
| 
|    [Note: discussion is needed as to whether justification for need of a
|    /36 is reasonable initial starting point, or whether the criteria of
|    an immediate need to address 776 sites is too high. Note also, that
|    once a request for an initial allocation has been granted, the
|    minimum allocation (i.e., /32) is provided, even though the requestor
|    has not justified a need for such a large amount of space.]

The general consensus at the meeting was that this placed too high a barrier
to registries at a time when getting real IPv6 deployment underway was seen as
becoming more urgent.

Several alternatives were discussed, but the one which seemed to achieve
almost complete consensus from those at the meeting involved dropping the "776
or more sites" and HD-Ratio requirements completely.  The proposal can be
summarised as:

   "For a limited period (no more than the first 2000 allocations in each RIR
   area was suggested), a requesting registry (either a LIR or NIR in the
   draft's terminology) would receive a /32 minimum allocation from the
   appropriate RIR on the documentation of at least one /48 assignment."

This is just one way of removing the barrier imposed in the current draft...
there are, of course, other possibilities which weren't discussed at the
meeting.  This lowers the barrier to whatever policies the RIRs have in place
for the establishment of new local or national registries.

The aim was seen as being to obtain global consensus based on the current
draft as an *interim* policy, with final policy being worked on as experience
was gained during the "2000*3 allocations" period.

Time was such that discussion of other sections of the draft were only covered
briefly, if at all.

James Aldridge
(Co-chair, RIPE LIR WG)