A Bio-Inspired Proposal for Internet Address System Modification

This paper presents a provisional design proposal for the modification of the numbering and address representation of Internet Protocol 4 (IPv4), the Internet address system nearing exhaustion, based on biology. Biologically-inspired designs have been applied in diverse technological fields with varying degrees of successes. The paper proposes the expansion of IPv4 addresses by the concatenation of twelve 8 bit suffixes to each IPv4 address using numbers derived from DNA sequences. The author outlines a design proposal for the modification of the addressing system of the network layer in the TCP/IP hierarchy. This scheme, if deemed possible, could see the creation of at least 6.4 × 1026 unique addresses and prolong the usefulness of IPv4, beyond the projected operational time frame of ten years.