Subnetwork - Network Addressing and Routing

Network Addressing and Routing

Computers participating in a network such as the Internet each have at least one logical address. Usually this address is unique to each device and can either be configured dynamically from a network server, statically by an administrator, or automatically by stateless address autoconfiguration.

An address fulfills the functions of identifying the host and locating it on the network. The most common network addressing architecture is Internet Protocol version 4 (IPv4), but its successor, IPv6, is in early deployment stages. An IPv4 address consists of 32 bits, for human readability written in a form consisting of four decimal octets separated by full stops (dots), called dot-decimal notation. An IPv6 address consists of 128 bits written in a hexadecimal notation and grouping 16 bits separated by colons.

For the purpose of network management, an IP address is logically divided into two logical parts, the network prefix and the host identifier or rest field. All hosts on a subnetwork have the same network prefix. This routing prefix occupies the most-significant bits of the address. The number of bits allocated within a network to the internal routing prefix may vary between subnets, depending on the network architecture. The host part is a unique local identification and is either a host number on the local network or an interface identifier.

This logical addressing structure permits the selective routing of IP packets across multiple networks via special gateway computers, called routers, to a destination host if the network prefixes of origination and destination hosts differ, or sent directly to a target host on the local network if they are the same. Routers constitute logical or physical borders between the subnets, and manage traffic between them. Each subnet is served by a designated default router, but may consist internally of multiple physical Ethernet segments interconnected by network switches or network bridges.

The routing prefix of an address is written in a form identical to that of the address itself. This is called the network mask, or netmask, of the address. For example, a specification of the most-significant 18 bits of an IPv4 address, 11111111.11111111.11000000.00000000, is written as 255.255.192.0. If this mask designates a subnet within a larger network, it is also called the subnet mask. This form of denoting the network mask, however, is only used for IPv4 networks. While in IPv6 the mask must consist of a set of contiguous 1-bits, in IPv4 this is not enforced, albeit no efficiency is gained.

The modern standard form of specification of the network prefix is CIDR notation, used for both IPv4 and IPv6. It counts the number of bits in the prefix and appends that number to the address after a slash (/) character separator:

• 192.168.0.0, netmask 255.255.255.0 is written as 192.168.0.0/24
• In IPv6, 2001:db8::/32 designates the address 2001:db8:: and its network prefix consisting of the most significant 32 bits.

This notation was introduced with Classless Inter-Domain Routing (CIDR) in RFC 4632. In IPv6 this is the only acceptable form to denote network or routing prefixes.

In classful networking in IPv4, prior to the introduction of CIDR, the network prefix could be directly obtained from the IP address, based on its highest order bit sequence. This determined the class (A, B, C) of the address and therefore the network mask. Since the introduction of CIDR, however, assignment of an IP address to a network interface requires two parameters, the address and its network mask.

In IPv4, on-link determination for an IP address is given simply by the address and netmask configuration, as the address cannot be disassociated from the on-link prefix. For IPv6, however, on-link determination is different in detail and requires the Neighbor Discovery Protocol (NDP). IPv6 address assignment to an interface carries no requirement of a matching on-link prefix and vice versa, with the exception of link-local addresses.

While subnetting may improve network performance in an organizational network, it increases routing complexity, since each locally connected subnet must be represented by a separate entry in the routing tables of each connected router. However, by careful design of the network, routes to collections of more distant subnets within the branches of a tree-hierarchy can be aggregated by single routes. Variable-length subnet masking (VLSM) functionality in commercial routers made the introduction of CIDR seamless across the Internet and in enterprise networks.