Impact of Development and Governance Factors on IPv4 Address Ownership

The worldwide distribution of IPv4 addresses is highly non-uniform. The factors that contribute to IPv4 address resources owned by a country remain unknown. In this paper, we systematically study the relationship between the number of allocated IPv4 addresses and 30 factors extracted from political, economic, ecological, social, and cultural dimensions. We observe that GDP has the largest influence on the number of IPv4 addresses while the influence of political factors is very weak. To further quantify the complex relationship among them, we fit data into a Decision Tree model. Based on the pruned model, we can extract precise rules that contribute to IPv4 address resources owned by a country. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first work to evaluate IPv4 address ownership by quantitative factors. Our work is helpful to better understand the network development of a country.