idea for ipv6 allocation scheme

[John O Comeau]

Since I haven't made a complete fool of myself on the net for a few months
now, it's time to throw caution to the winds and toss out an idea I got
yesterday morning in that semiawake state when lots of ideas of dubious
quality enter the impressionable mind. This one seemed like a winner.

Use street addresses as internet addresses. It's inherently routeable, and
extremely easy to implement, but frivolously wasteful of address
space. Here's an example. Let's say a TLA is assigned for this in the
spirit of 6to4; 2666. My address is 5555 Bogus St, Somecity, FL,
US. Compressing out the spaces and punctuation to reduce the
inefficiency, and assigning a planet code TA (Terra) to make this scheme
last a few years, we get: 5555BOGUSSTSOMECITYFLUSTA. Now inverting the
byte order, and prepending the TLA, we get &fATSULFYTICEMOSTSSUGOB5555
which is 27 bytes long, still way too big. Even using RAD50 (remember
that, anybody?) we could only get it down to 19 bytes. But, due to the
hierarchical nature of this scheme, an entity such as FL (the state
Florida) could help by providing two- or three-letter abbreviations for
each city. And if necessary, each city could provide numbers for every
named street. Numbers can then be packed into 16-bit unsigned small
integers. Now my address is 5555 3333 St, SC, FL, US. Packed, that becomes
&fATSULFCSTS33UU, 16 bytes. Now I have my unique internet address.

Contrived? Of course. Possible to implement? I think so. Each level of the
hierarchy could provide the scheme for compressing the next lower level's
data. This could all be made available publicly in a way such that my Aunt
in Bingham, Maine only needs to find out my street address and type it
into a browser, and the browser can fetch the compression rules from each
level of the hierarchy and generate the address, and she can then see my
webpage.

An address in China would begin &fATNC and the remaining 10 bytes could be
Unicode (big5 would't go too far, would it?). I doubt if 5 characters
would work either, but then again, that country, or city, or city block,
could establish its own method of ensuring that every address can fit into
the 16 bytes of an IPv6 address. Of course, the planet and country codes
can be squished into a byte each, also.

This is probably not precisely the best venue for this discussion, but
there are a lot of intelligent people on this list with the necessary
diversity of viewpoints to give this a thorough beating. And if it meets
dead silence, I'll know it was a complete waste of time typing this in.

Thanks in advance - jc

jcomeau@world.std.com aka John Otis Lene Comeau
Home page: http://world.std.com/~jcomeau/
Disclaimer: Don't risk anything of value based on free advice.
"Anybody can do the difficult stuff. Call me when it's impossible."