The IP standard to end all other IP standards.
Supports arbitrarily large IP addresses built from two word types, each 128 bits wide.
The expansion area uses its MSB as a continuation flag: if MSB=1, the next
128-bit word is also an expansion word; if MSB=0, the expansion area ends and the address area
follows. The lower 127 bits of all expansion words, concatenated and interpreted as a single big-integer,
encode the total bit-length of the address area that follows. This mirrors UTF-8 continuation logic but
applied to address sizing rather than codepoints.
The address area is a hierarchical B*-tree structure. Two addresses sharing a common
leading-segment prefix are hierarchically related, the shared prefix is the parent node.
For example, after |AAA|BBB| and |AAA|CCC|, nodes BBB and
CCC are siblings under parent AAA. Routing tables can prefix-match on
leading segments exactly as BGP prefixes work today, but at arbitrary depth.
Special addresses: All-zero fill = network address. All-one fill = broadcast address.
Text representation uses RFC 1924 base85 (4 bytes to 5 chars, lossless grouping),
with segments separated by |.
| Word offset | Bit map structure (bits 0–127) | |
|---|---|---|
| Word 0 | Version4 bits | Total Length124 bits |
| Word 1 | Time to Live (TTL)128 bits | |
| Word 2 | Protocol128 bits | |
| Word 3 | Header Checksum128 bits | |
| Word 4–N | Source Addressvariable — expansion-encoded length | |
| Word N+1–M | Destination Addressvariable — expansion-encoded length | |