Extended-Network-Prefix

Internet routers use only the network-prefix of the destination address to route traffic to a subnetted environment. Routers within the subnetted environment use the extended-network- prefix to route traffic between the individualsubnets. The extended-network-prefix is composed of the classful network-prefix and the subnet-number.

Figure 8: Extended-Network-Prefix

The extended-network-prefix has traditionally been identified by the subnet mask. For example, if you have the /16 address of 130.5.0.0 and you want to use the entire third octet to represent the subnet-number, you need to specify a subnet mask of 255.255.255.0. The bits in the subnet mask and the Internet address have a one-to-one correspondence. The bits of the subnet mask are set to 1 if the system examining the address should treat the corresponding bit in the IP address as part of the extended-network- prefix. The bits in the mask are set to 0 if the system should treat the bit as part of the host-number. This is illustrated if Figure 9.

Figure 9: Subnet Mask

The standards describing modern routing protocols often refer to the extended-network-prefix- length rather than the subnet mask. The prefix length is equal to the number of contiguous one-bits in the traditional subnet mask. This means that specifying the network address 130.5.5.25 with a subnet mask of 255.255.255.0 can also be expressed as 130.5.5.25/24. The /<prefix-length> notation is more compact and easier to understand than writing out the mask in its traditional dotted-decimal format. This is illustrated in Figure 10.

Figure 10: Extended-Network-Prefix Length

However, it is important to note that modern routing protocols still carry the subnet mask. There are no Internet standard routing protocols that have a one-byte field in their header that contains the number of bits in the extended-network prefix. Rather, each routing protocol is still required to carry the complete four-octet subnet mask.