Routing and Addressing with Length Variable IP Address

IP addressing has become the core of Internet since the Internet was invented and its significance has never changed. However, with the dramatic development of Internet in recent years, the conventional IP address is facing with more and more problems, such as address exhaustion, low packet efficiency in Internet of Things, etc. The reason is that the conventional IP address is designed with fixed length, lacking of extensibility, while the demands for address varies greatly in different cases. To solve these problems, we propose a new address system called Flexible Address System (FAS). The FAS is designed with an infinite address space and can provide variable-length addresses on demand. Accordingly, multiple Routing Information Bases (RIBs) are used on routers to store FAS routing entries according to their different length. Further, a new data structure called Multi-Entrance-Trie (METrie) is proposed as the realization of multiple RIBs. The METrie is designed with multiple entrance nodes, enabling fast lookup. Experiments show that the METrie can achieve a high efficiency lookup on routers with less storage costs, implying that the FAS is friendly to the scale of routing table.