Internetworking Technology

Dear all! Every day the demand for network addresses from organizations that want to be connected to the internet. Therefore the availability of network addresses for assigning to such organizations keeps on decreasing. There are two solutions available at present namely subnetting and supernetting. In subnetting, one big network is split into a large number of smaller networks. Every subnet is given its own subnet address. IP addresses are designed containing two levels of hierarchy with network and host being its levels. There will be default mask which masks the hosted and the rest of the bits define the address of the network. Due to the addition of more subnets, a hierarchy with three levels is needed. The three levels are site, subnet and host.

Subnet is the intermediate level between site and host. A subnet mask is needed whenever a network is to be subnetted. Therefore the subnet mask will take care of the subnet address and the default mask will take care of network address. In some cases, the maximum number of addresses assigned to an organization will not be sufficient to satisfy their needs. Supernetting will be an ideal solution for that problem. Here, the organization is allowed to combine a number of class C blocks after their class A and B addresses had depleted to produce a large range of addresses. It is certainly needed to know the first address in the superblock which is created by combining several blocks and the supernet mask. The supernet mask defines the number of blocks combined to make a superblock.