Patent ID: 7836182

Claim:
A method comprising: defining, with an address manager executing on a processor of a network device, a base network address object data type that specifies generic attributes needed for any type of network address assignment regardless of which of a plurality of different network access protocols is used to request a network address; defining, with the address manager, a plurality of different protocol-specific network address object data types that each specifies protocol-specific attributes needed for network address assignment for a respective one of the plurality of the network access protocols; receiving, with the network device, network address requests from a plurality of subscriber devices in accordance with the plurality of different network access protocols; processing the network address requests with a plurality of software clients executing within the network device to invoke the address manager, wherein each of the plurality of software clients services a different one of a plurality of protocol-specific network access request types for the different network access protocols and invokes the address manager via a universal application programming interface (API) regardless of the network access protocol by which the network address is requested; for each of the requests, instantiating with the address manager an address object within an aggregated pool of network addresses and assigning a network address from the aggregate pool of network addresses to the instantiated address object, wherein the instantiated address object includes the protocol-specific attributes from one of the protocol-specific network address object data types and inherits the generic attributes from the base network address object data type; returning the instantiated address objects from the address manager to the software clients executing on the network device; with the software clients executing on the network device, creating a protocol-specific network address from each of the address objects based on the generic attributes and the protocol-specific attributes included within the address object; forwarding the protocol-specific network addresses to the subscriber devices in response to the network address requests; configuring the aggregated pool of network addresses with a user interface, wherein the user interface presents a unified view for management of the network addresses within the aggregated pool of network addresses for the plurality of different network access protocols; and in response to a command, producing with the user interface an output that combines statistics and configuration parameters of the aggregated pool of network addresses for the plurality of different network access protocols.