2.3 IP Address Issues and Solutions
2.3.1 Addressing issues

The rapid growth of the internet has brought about two issues with the IP addressing first introduced in 1981: first, IP address exhaustion; and second, routing table growth and manageability.

IPv6 (the next-generation IP) responds to these issues by introducing a 128-bit address. In the meantime, RFCs have been introduced to enable the current IP addressing scheme to be organized in a hierarchical manner. One particularly effective method of combating these problems is by using addressing hierarchies, as described in the next section.