IPv4 address exhaustion is the depletion of the pool of unallocated IPv4 addresses. Because there are fewer than 4.3 billion addresses available, depletion has been anticipated since the late 1980s, when the Internet started to experience dramatic growth. This depletion is one of the reasons for the development and deployment of its successor protocol, IPv6. Currently IPv4 and IPv6 coexist in the Internet.
what protocol could be used to issue an ip address to network devices
IPv6 IPv6 IPv4 IPv4 IPv4