RFC DRAFT September 1992

Internet Drafts are draft documents valid for a maximum of six months. Internet Drafts may be updated, replaced, or obsoleted by other documents at any time. It is not appropriate to use Internet Drafts as reference material or to cite them other than as a ''working draft'' or ''work in progress.'' Please check the 1id-abstracts.txt listing contained in the internet-drafts Shadow Directories on nic. to learn the current status of any Internet Draft. 1 Introduction This paper provides guidelines for allocating IP addresses in the Internet. These guidelines are intended to play an important role in steering the Internet towards the Address Assignment and Aggregating Strategy outlined in [1]. 2 Scope The global internet can be modeled as a collection of hosts interconnected via transmission and switching facilities. Control over the collection of hosts and the transmission and switching facilities that compose the networking resources of the global internet is not homogeneous, but is distributed among multiple administrative authorities. Resources under control of a single administration form a domain. For the rest of this paper, 'domain' and 'routing domain' will be used interchangeably. Domains that share their resources with other domains are called service providers (or just providers). Domains that utilize other domain's resources are called service subscribers (or just