Understanding the Limitations of Classful Networking
When IPv4 addressing was designed in the 1970s, it was based on assumptions about the use of the network for which it was designed. These assumptions grossly underestimated the number of organizations to be connected, the number of end systems per organization, and the total number of end systems on the network. None of the designers could have foreseen the eventual growth of the Internet to its size in the 1980s, not to mention what it is today!
The design flaws resulted in three main issues:
- Exhaustion of the Class B network address space
- Unmanageable routing tables
- Exhaustion of the 32-bit IPv4 address space
Two of these flaws were addressed by the introduction of Classless Inter-Domain ...
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