Impact of IPv4 address allocation practice on BGP routing table growth

Rapid BGP (border gateway protocol) routing table growth has been a main concern for the operation of the Internet in recent years. We study how current IPv4 address allocation practice affects the BGP table growth. The practice includes both newly-made allocations and two address policies, i.e., allocation size and minimum allocation size. We first found that the address blocks allocated during the past five years contributed to more than 71% of the BGP table growth within the same period. Moreover, contributions made by allocated address blocks quickly become static after the allocation. Based on this observation, we propose an empirical model to emulate table growth. We next study the impact of two address policies and show that while the "allocation size" policy is observed to have visible impact on the growth, there is no clear evidence that the "minimum allocation size" policy, designed for slowing down table size increase, has suppressed growth. We finally discuss how the address policies could have better controlled the BGP table growth.