ARPIM: IP Address Resource Pooling and Intelligent Management System for Broadband IP Networks

IP address resources work as basic elements for providing broadband network services. However, the increase in number, diversity and complexity of modern network devices and services creates unprecedented challenges for current manual IP address management. Manually maintaining IP address resources could always be sub-optimal for IP resource utilization. Besides, it requires heavy human efforts from network operators. To achieve high utilization and flexible scheduling of IP network address resources, this article introduces APRIM, an innovative SDNbased IP address pooling and intelligent management system, in which we design a centralized address management system to realize dynamic allocation, reclaim, and reallocation of address blocks for the current BRAS/vBRAS deployment. We developed a prototype system and evaluated the system based on real-world networks and users in two provinces from China Telecom. Experimental results demonstrate that our system can largely improve the address utilization efficiently and reduce the network resource maintenance workload.