Group 8
Andrej Cattaneo, Ivana Riva, Noura Sammoura, Maria del Pilar Suarez Anzorena, Arthur van der
Werf, Yueling Wu.
We all know the number of devices connected to the internet is increasing. From a smartwatch to a
smart thermostat that communicates with your phone to know when you are home, more and more objects
are communicating to each other. Understandably, many people nowadays use to term Internet of Things
or IoT, but what does this actually mean?
Lisa Elénius Taylor, head of IoT marketing for Ericsson, explained, "at the most basic
level, the Internet of Things is a network of devices, vehicles and appliances that have software
and connectivity capabilities". These "things" that can connect to a grid are able to exchange
information but in order to do so they need a name, or an address recognised by all other members of
this grid. This address is called Internet Protocol version 4 or IPv4.
How did the world respond to the rise of the Internet and how is connectivity distributed today?
The goal of this project was to provide an overview of the Internet of Things and therefore it studies the addresses needed for connectivity. In the graph, the adoption behaviour over time is shown per country. At first sight, it can be seen how different regions respond to the increase in connectivity. Some regions or countries start adopting addresses later or more rapidly than others. In the treemap at the bottom, the result of this race can be seen in terms of a countries total amount compared to others.
The annotations guides the user in reading the chart.
Pattern created by peaks.
Peak
The behaviour of the countries is expressed by horizontal bars that form a shape similar to a frequency almost like a seismogram. It was important to eliminate the concept of quantity from this graph because the data was normalised. By showing the activity the countries can be compared regardless of their size.
Detail of the tree map.
Treemap
Obviously, countries are different and therefore have a different number of IPs. The true differences are enormous and range from around a thousand to a billion per country. To give a sense of the difference in scale the final situation in 2019 is represented in a treemap. As is clearly visible, the United States cover the biggest area. Russia and the Netherlands have a similar number of IPs although Russia has a way higher population and country size.
In general, one can see that there are two main periods where IP addresses were popular. In the beginning of the nineties some early adoption countries gained a lot of IPs. The second period started in the beginning of the zeroes. Soon it became clear that the four billion possible addresses of IPv4 were not enough. Therefore, its successor, the IPv6 protocol was created which allows for 340 undecillion or 340 and 36 zeros. The last IPv4 addresses were allocated to RIR in 2011 and later divided over the countries. From the graph it is visible that AFRINIC was the RIR with the most adoption after 2011. Although countries have been adopting IPv6 since 1999, IPv4 remains the main protocol for internet use, that is why the IPv4 provides an accurate insight in the current situation of connected devices.
RIPE NCC ran out of IPv4 addresses in 2012.
We found a source that provides statistics from the official Regional Internet Registries (RIRs): AFRINIC (Africa), APNIC (Asia-Pacific), ARIN (North America and Antarctic), LACNIC (Latin America and Caribbean) and RIPE NCC (Europe). These statistics contain the number of IPv4 and IPv6 addresses assigned and allocated. The data about the IPv6 was incomplete but as IPv4 is still the most commonly used protocol it represents an insight in most connected consumer devices.
The Regional Internet Registries.
