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Address pool

Set of addresses in the IP address allocation hierarchy

Wikipedia contributorsAdapted for Fathomly · View authors
1 min read
Source updated August 10, 2021

In the context of the Internet addressing structure, an address pool is a set of Internet Protocol addresses available at any level in the IP address allocation hierarchy. At the top level, the IP address pool is managed by the Internet Assigned Numbers Authority (IANA). The total IPv4 address pool contains 4294967296 (232) addresses, while the size of the IPv6 address pool is 2128 (340282366920938463463374607431768211456) addresses.

In the context of application design, an address pool may be the availability of a set of addresses (IP address, MAC address) available to an application that is shared among its users, or available for allocation to users, such as in host configurations with the Dynamic Host Configuration Protocol (DHCP).

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This article is adapted from the Wikipedia article “Address pool”, written by its contributors and licensed under CC BY-SA 4.0. Fathomly has changed the layout, removed citation markers, navigation and maintenance notices, and adjusted punctuation. This adapted version is shared under the same license. For references, see the original article.

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Related topics

Dynamic Host Configuration Protocol

The Dynamic Host Configuration Protocol is a network management protocol used on Internet Protocol (IP) networks for automatically assigning IP addresses and other communication parameters to devices connected to the network using a client-server architecture. The technology eliminates the need for individually configuring network devices manually, and consists of two network components, a centrally installed network DHCP server and client instances of the protocol stack on each computer or device.

IPv4 address exhaustion

IPv4 address exhaustion was the depletion of the pool of unallocated IPv4 addresses. Because the original Internet architecture had fewer than 4.3 billion addresses available, depletion had been anticipated since the late 1980s when the Internet started experiencing dramatic growth.

List of assigned /8 IPv4 address blocks

Some large /8 blocks of IPv4 addresses, the former Class A network blocks, are assigned in whole to single organizations or related groups of organizations, either by the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers, through the Internet Assigned Numbers Authority (IANA), or a regional Internet registry. Each /8 block contains 2563 = 224 = 16,777,216 addresses, which covers the whole range of the last three delimited segments of an IP address.