On the Dynamics of IP Address Allocation and Availability of End-Hosts

The availability of end-hosts and their assigned routable IP addresses has impact on the ability to fight spammers and attackers, and on peer-to-peer application performance. Previous works study the availability of hosts mostly by using either active pinging or by studying access to a mail service, both approaches suffer from inherent inaccuracies. We take a different approach by measuring the IP addresses periodically reported by a uniquely identified group of the hosts running the DIMES agent. This fresh approach provides a chance to measure the true availability of end-hosts and the dynamics of their assigned routable IP addresses. Using a two month study of 1804 hosts, we find that over 60% of the hosts have a fixed IP address and 90% median availability, while some of the remaining hosts have more than 30 different IPs. For those that have periodically changing IP addresses, we find that the median average period per AS is roughly 24 hours, with a strong relation between the offline time and the probability of altering IP address.