Classless Inter-Domain Routing

Acronym. CIDR. Classless Inter-Domain Routing; normally an IP address notation such as 192.168.1.0/24 indicating a block of addresses. The number after the slash indicates how many bits are in the mask; bits to the right are not masked.

CIDR (Classless Inter-Domain Routing or supernetting)

CIDR (Classless Inter-Domain Routing, sometimes called supernetting) is a way to allow more flexible allocation of Internet Protocol (IP) addresses than was possible with the original system of IP address classes. As a result, the number of available Internet addresses was greatly increased, which along with widespread use of network address translation (NAT), has significantly extended the useful life of IPv4.

cidr calculator

Follow below link

http://www.subnet-calculator.com/cidr.php

http://jodies.de/ipcalc?host=192.16.0.1&mask1=16&mask2=

CIDR - Classless Inter Domain Routing

CIDR - Classless Inter Domain Routing - was adopted to help ease the load imposed on internet and large network backbone routers by the increasing size of routing tables.

Large routing tables have several adverse effects:

• Routers require more memory in order to store and manipulate their routing tables which increases operation costs.
• Routing latency is increased due to the large amount of data contained in the routing tables.
• Network bandwidth usage is increased by routing updates when routers exchange their routing tables.

A solution to these problems was found in CIDR. CIDR permits IP Address aggregation which in turn reduces the size of routing tables and so addresses the problems listed above.

CIDR and IP Address Aggregation

So what is IP Address Aggregation? Quite simply, IP Address Aggregation means that several networks can be spanned by a single routing entry. Consider the following case:

Our router needs to route traffic for eight seperate networks through the same gateway (ip address 194.1.1.1):

ip route 66.100.50.0 255.255.255.224 194.1.1.1
ip route 66.100.50.32 255.255.255.224 194.1.1.1
ip route 66.100.50.64 255.255.255.224 194.1.1.1
ip route 66.100.50.96 255.255.255.224 194.1.1.1
ip route 66.100.50.128 255.255.255.224 194.1.1.1
ip route 66.100.50.160 255.255.255.224 194.1.1.1
ip route 66.100.50.192 255.255.255.224 194.1.1.1
ip route 66.100.50.224 255.255.255.224 194.1.1.1

Without CIDR, our routing table would need to maintain a seperate entry for each of the eight individual networks.

As the eight example networks are contiguous, i.e. their address spaces follow numerically with no gaps, we can encapsulate all eight with a single CIDR route by simply changing the subnet mask:

ip route 66.100.50.0 255.255.255.0 194.1.1.1

It's easy to see the benefit of IP Address Aggregation and CIDR when we see the difference in routing table entries between the "before CIDR" and "after CIDR" cases above. This is a very simple example but it is easy to imagine how CIDR can help in the real world with much larger aggregations.

CIDR brings with it its own simplified form of IP network address notation. Instead of using the network address and subnet mask, CIDR notation uses the network address followed by a slash ("/") and the number of mask bits. For example, taking the CIDR network from the above case:

66.100.50.0 255.255.255.0

would become  66.100.50.0/24