What Is Supernet?
If you've ever tried to get your head around the Internet's routing table, you know it's a different walk in the park. Super netting combines several independent IP networks into one network with a single classless interdomain routing (CIDR) prefix. The new combined network has the same routing prefix as the collection of the prefixes of the subnets. Supernetting enables organizations to combine several independent routes into one route, which reduces their network size and minimizes network routing devices by decreasing the number of ways you need to store on your router. It also helps conserve address space and allows routers to process routing information more efficiently while matching routes. Supernetting supports CIDR addressing, which can help reduce the size of your routing table entries by using fewer bits than traditional IPv4 addresses allowed. This is excellent news if you want things to go smoothly! Supernetting can be a bit of a headache, but the benefits are worth it. When you supernet, you borrow bits from the network ID and allocate them to the host ID. This means that you can fit more hosts into one IP address, which is great because it saves storage space on your route table. This also means that your network will have fewer subnets, which means there's less complexity when routing packets. It also means that it's easier for other routers in your area to make topological changes without having their routes blocked by yours, making convergence faster and your environment more stable. Supernetting requires routing protocols that support CIDR (Classless Inter-Domain Routing). The other protocols, Interior Gateway Routing Protocol (IGRP), Exterior Gateway Protocol (EGP) and Routing Information Protocol Version 1 (RIPv1), don't support CIDR-related functionality. If you're a fan of supernets, they have drawbacks. The most notable of these is the complexity of CIDR compared to a classful addressing system and the need for new routing protocols that support the CIDR. The ability to customize the network identifier length also makes it harder for the system administrators to differentiate between a host identifier and a network identifier. A new form of IP address writing called slash, or CIDR, notation was developed to solve this issue.
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