Subnetting & CIDR

Tahir Azim

Courtesy Nick McKeown (Stanford), Umar Kalim

(NIIT)
 Announcements
• Participate in NASCON, FAST-NU Islamabad
• Assignment 1 deadline extended to Tuesday
due to no BIT-7 classes on Monday
• From last time:
– Packet bursting: An approach to increasing the speed
of 802.11g-based wireless networks by unwrapping
short 802.11g packets and rebundling them into a
larger packet to reduce the impact of mandatory gaps
between packets (jwire.com)

Courtesy Nick McKeown (Stanford), Umar Kalim

(NIIT)
 Subnetting
• Subnetting is a form of hierarchical routing.
• Subnets are usually represented via an address
plus a subnet mask or “netmask”.
• e.g.
nickm@elaine17.Stanford.EDU > ifconfig hme0
hme0: flags=863<UP,BROADCAST,NOTRAILERS,RUNNING,MULTICAST> mtu
1500
inet 171.64.15.82 netmask ffffff00 broadcast 171.64.15.255

• Netmask ffffff00: the first 24 bits are the subnet ID,

and the last 8 bits are the host ID.
• Can also be represented by a “prefix + length”, e.g.
171.64.15.0/24, or just 171.64.15/24.
Courtesy Nick McKeown (Stanford), Umar Kalim
(NIIT)
 Subnetting

2 14 16
CLASS “B”
10 Net ID Host-ID
e.g. Company

2 14 16 2 14 16
e.g. Site 10 Net ID 0000 Host-ID 10 Net ID 1111 Host-ID

Subnet ID (20) Subnet

Host ID (12)
Subnet ID (20) Subnet
Host ID (12)

2 14 16 2 14 16

e.g. Dept 10 Net ID 000000 Host-ID 10 Net ID 1111011011 Host-ID

Subnet ID (22) Subnet

Host ID (10)
Subnet ID (26) Subnet
Host ID (6)

Courtesy Nick McKeown (Stanford), Umar Kalim

(NIIT)
Routing in the presence of subnets
• The rest of the
Internet is not aware
of subnets within a
network
• Levels: site, subnet,
host
• Routing now involves
delivery to the site,
then the subnet and
finally the host

Courtesy Nick McKeown (Stanford), Umar Kalim

(NIIT)
 Example of subnetting
To: cenic.net
hpr1-rtr 171.64.1.131 171.64.74.0/24
171.64.1.132/30
171.64.1.133

171.64.1.161 171.64.1.178 171.64.74.1

Class B
Address bbr2-rtr Gates-rtr
171.64.1.160/27 171.64.74.58
171.64.0.0/16
AS 32 EndHost
171.64.1.152
171.64.1.144/28
To: cogentco.com
border2-rtr 171.64.1.148

Courtesy Nick McKeown (Stanford), Umar Kalim

(NIIT)
Classless Interdomain Routing (CIDR)
Addressing
 The IP address space is broken into line segments, or blocks
 e.g. Block of 2 addresses, block of 128 addresses etc.
 Each block is described by a prefix.
 A prefix is of the form x/y where x indicates the prefix of all addresses
in the block, and y indicates the length of the prefix.
 e.g. The prefix 128.9/16 represents the block containing addresses in
the range: 128.9.0.0 … 128.9.255.255.

128.9.0.0
142.12/19
65/8
128.9/16

0 232-1
2 16

128.9.16.14
Courtesy Nick McKeown (Stanford), Umar Kalim
(NIIT)
Classless Interdomain Routing (CIDR)
Addressing

128.9.19/24
128.9.25/24

128.9.16/20 128.9.176/20

128.9/16

0 232-1

128.9.16.14

Most specific route = “longest matching prefix”

Courtesy Nick McKeown (Stanford), Umar Kalim

(NIIT)
Classless Interdomain Routing (CIDR)
Addressing

Prefix aggregation:
 If a service provider serves two organizations with
prefixes, it can (sometimes) aggregate them to form a
shorter prefix. Other routers can refer to this shorter
prefix, and so reduce the size of their address table.
 E.g. ISP serves 128.9.14.0/24 and 128.9.15.0/24, it
can tell other routers to send it all packets belonging
to the prefix 128.9.14.0/23.
ISP Choice:
 In principle, an organization can keep its prefix if it
changes service providers.

Courtesy Nick McKeown (Stanford), Umar Kalim

(NIIT)
 Size of the Routing Table at
the core of the Internet

Source: http://www.cidr-report.org/

Courtesy Nick McKeown (Stanford), Umar Kalim

(NIIT)
 Prefix Length Distribution
100000
Number of entries

80000
60000
40000
20000
0

8 11 14 17 20 23
Prefix length (bits)
Source: Geoff Huston, Jan 2006

Courtesy Nick McKeown (Stanford), Umar Kalim

(NIIT)
Examples

Courtesy Nick McKeown (Stanford), Umar Kalim

(NIIT)
 Finding the first address
• What is the first address in the block if one of the
addresses is 167.199.170.82/27?

• Solution: The prefix length is 27, which means

that we must keep the first 27 bits as is and
change the remaining bits (5) to 0s. The
following shows the process:

Address in binary: 10100111 11000111 10101010 01010010

Keep the left 27 bits: 10100111 11000111 10101010 01000000
Result in CIDR notation: 167.199.170.64/27

Courtesy Nick McKeown (Stanford), Umar Kalim

(NIIT)
 Finding the first address
• What is the first address in the block if one of the
addresses is 140.120.84.24/20?

Courtesy Nick McKeown (Stanford), Umar Kalim

(NIIT)
 Finding the last address in the
block
• To the first address, add the number of
addresses, minus one
• OR
• Set all bits that are not part of the CIDR
prefix to 1

Courtesy Nick McKeown (Stanford), Umar Kalim

(NIIT)
 Example
• Find the number of addresses in the block
if one of the addresses is
140.120.84.24/20.
• Solution: The prefix length is 20. The
number of addresses in the block is 232−20
or 212 or 4096. Note that this is a large
block with 4096 addresses.

Courtesy Nick McKeown (Stanford), Umar Kalim

(NIIT)
 Example 2
• Find the last address in the block if one of the
addresses is 140.120.84.24/20.

• Solution
– We found in the previous examples that the first
address is 140.120.80.0/20 and the number of
addresses is 4096. To find the last address, we need
to add 4095 (4096 − 1) to the first address.
– Or, set all bits that are not part of the CIDR prefix to 1
• 140.120.(0101 1111)2. (1111 1111)2 = 140.120.95.255

Courtesy Nick McKeown (Stanford), Umar Kalim

(NIIT)