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rfc:rfc4632

Network Working Group V. Fuller Request for Comments: 4632 Cisco Systems BCP: 122 T. Li Obsoletes: 1519 Tropos Networks Category: Best Current Practice August 2006

              Classless Inter-domain Routing (CIDR):
        The Internet Address Assignment and Aggregation Plan

Status of This Memo

 This document specifies an Internet Best Current Practices for the
 Internet Community, and requests discussion and suggestions for
 improvements.  Distribution of this memo is unlimited.

Copyright Notice

 Copyright (C) The Internet Society (2006).

Abstract

 This memo discusses the strategy for address assignment of the
 existing 32-bit IPv4 address space with a view toward conserving the
 address space and limiting the growth rate of global routing state.
 This document obsoletes the original Classless Inter-domain Routing
 (CIDR) spec in RFC 1519, with changes made both to clarify the
 concepts it introduced and, after more than twelve years, to update
 the Internet community on the results of deploying the technology
 described.

Fuller & Li Best Current Practice [Page 1] RFC 4632 CIDR Address Strategy August 2006

Table of Contents

 1. Introduction ....................................................3
 2. History and Problem Description .................................3
 3. Classless Addressing as a Solution ..............................4
    3.1. Basic Concept and Prefix Notation ..........................5
 4. Address Assignment and Routing Aggregation ......................8
    4.1. Aggregation Efficiency and Limitations .....................8
    4.2. Distributed Assignment of Address Space ...................10
 5. Routing Implementation Considerations ..........................11
    5.1. Rules for Route Advertisement .............................11
    5.2. How the Rules Work ........................................12
    5.3. A Note on Prefix Filter Formats ...........................13
    5.4. Responsibility for and Configuration of Aggregation .......13
    5.5. Route Propagation and Routing Protocol Considerations .....15
 6. Example of New Address Assignments and Routing .................15
    6.1. Address Delegation ........................................15
    6.2. Routing Advertisements ....................................17
 7. Domain Name Service Considerations .............................18
 8. Transition to a Long-Term Solution .............................18
 9. Analysis of CIDR's Effect on Global Routing State ..............19
 10. Conclusions and Recommendations ...............................20
 11. Status Updates to CIDR Documents ..............................21
 12. Security Considerations .......................................23
 13. Acknowledgements ..............................................24
 14. References ....................................................25
    14.1. Normative References .....................................25
    14.2. Informative References ...................................25

Fuller & Li Best Current Practice [Page 2] RFC 4632 CIDR Address Strategy August 2006

1. Introduction

 This memo discusses the strategy for address assignment of the
 existing 32-bit IPv4 address space with a view toward conserving the
 address space and limiting the growth rate of global routing state.
 This document obsoletes the original CIDR spec [RFC1519], with
 changes made both to clarify the concepts it introduced and, after
 more than twelve years, to update the Internet community on the
 results of deploying the technology described.

2. History and Problem Description

 What is now known as the Internet started as a research project in
 the 1970s to design and develop a set of protocols that could be used
 with many different network technologies to provide a seamless, end-
 to-end facility for interconnecting a diverse set of end systems.
 When it was determined how the 32-bit address space would be used,
 certain assumptions were made about the number of organizations to be
 connected, the number of end systems per organization, and total
 number of end systems on the network.  The end result was the
 establishment (see [RFC791]) of three classes of networks: Class A
 (most significant address bits '00'), with 128 possible networks each
 and 16777216 end systems (minus special bit values reserved for
 network/broadcast addresses); Class B (MSB '10'), with 16384 possible
 networks each with 65536 end systems (less reserved values); and
 Class C (MSB '110'), and 2097152 possible networks each and 254 end
 systems (256 bit combinations minus the reserved all-zeros and all-
 ones patterns).  The set of addresses with MSB '111' was reserved for
 future use; parts of this were eventually defined (MSB '1110') for
 use with IPv4 multicast and parts are still reserved as of the
 writing of this document.
 In the late 1980s, the expansion and commercialization of the former
 research network resulted in the connection of many new organizations
 to the rapidly growing Internet, and each new organization required
 an address assignment according to the Class A/B/C addressing plan.
 As demand for new network numbers (particularly in the Class B space)
 took what appeared to be an exponential growth rate, some members of
 the operations and engineering community started to have concerns
 over the long-term scaling properties of the class A/B/C system and
 began thinking about how to modify network number assignment policy
 and routing protocols to accommodate the growth.  In November, 1991,
 the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) created the ROAD (Routing
 and Addressing) group to examine the situation.  This group met in
 January 1992 and identified three major problems:

Fuller & Li Best Current Practice [Page 3] RFC 4632 CIDR Address Strategy August 2006

 1.  Exhaustion of the Class B network address space.  One fundamental
     cause of this problem is the lack of a network class of a size
     that is appropriate for mid-sized organization.  Class C, with a
     maximum of 254 host addresses, is too small, whereas Class B,
     which allows up to 65534 host addresses, is too large for most
     organizations but was the best fit available for use with
     subnetting.
 2.  Growth of routing tables in Internet routers beyond the ability
     of current software, hardware, and people to effectively manage.
 3.  Eventual exhaustion of the 32-bit IPv4 address space.
     It was clear that then-current rates of Internet growth would
     cause the first two problems to become critical sometime between
     1993 and 1995.  Work already in progress on topological
     assignment of addressing for Connectionless Network Service
     (CLNS), which was presented to the community at the Boulder IETF
     in December of 1990, led to thoughts on how to re-structure the
     32-bit IPv4 address space to increase its lifespan.  Work in the
     ROAD group followed and eventually resulted in the publication of
     [RFC1338], and later, [RFC1519].
     The design and deployment of CIDR was intended to solve these
     problems by providing a mechanism to slow the growth of global
     routing tables and to reduce the rate of consumption of IPv4
     address space.  It did not and does not attempt to solve the
     third problem, which is of a more long-term nature; instead, it
     endeavors to ease enough of the short- to mid-term difficulties
     to allow the Internet to continue to function efficiently while
     progress is made on a longer-term solution.
     More historical background on this effort and on the ROAD group
     may be found in [RFC1380] and at [LWRD].

3. Classless Addressing as a Solution

 The solution that the community created was to deprecate the Class
 A/B/C network address assignment system in favor of using
 "classless", hierarchical blocks of IP addresses (referred to as
 prefixes).  The assignment of prefixes is intended to roughly follow
 the underlying Internet topology so that aggregation can be used to
 facilitate scaling of the global routing system.  One implication of
 this strategy is that prefix assignment and aggregation is generally
 done according to provider-subscriber relationships, since that is
 how the Internet topology is determined.

Fuller & Li Best Current Practice [Page 4] RFC 4632 CIDR Address Strategy August 2006

 When originally proposed in [RFC1338] and [RFC1519], this addressing
 plan was intended to be a relatively short-term response, lasting
 approximately three to five years, during which a more permanent
 addressing and routing architecture would be designed and
 implemented.  As can be inferred from the dates on the original
 documents, CIDR has far outlasted its anticipated lifespan and has
 become the mid-term solution to the problems described above.
 Note that in the following text we describe the current policies and
 procedures that have been put in place to implement the allocation
 architecture discussed here.  This description is not intended to be
 interpreted as direction to IANA.
 Coupled with address management strategies implemented by the
 Regional Internet Registries (see [NRO] for details), the deployment
 of CIDR-style addressing has also reduced the rate at which IPv4
 address space has been consumed, thus providing short- to medium-term
 relief to problem #3, described above.
 Note that, as defined, this plan neither requires nor assumes the
 re-assignment of those parts of the legacy "Class C" space that are
 not amenable to aggregation (sometimes called "the swamp").  Doing so
 would somewhat reduce routing table sizes (current estimate is that
 "the swamp" contains approximately 15,000 entries), though at a
 significant renumbering cost.  Similarly, there is no hard
 requirement that any end site renumber when changing transit service
 provider, but end sites are encouraged do so to eliminate the need
 for explicit advertisement of their prefixes into the global routing
 system.

3.1. Basic Concept and Prefix Notation

 In the simplest sense, the change from Class A/B/C network numbers to
 classless prefixes is to make explicit which bits in a 32-bit IPv4
 address are interpreted as the network number (or prefix) associated
 with a site and which are the used to number individual end systems
 within the site.  In CIDR notation, a prefix is shown as a 4-octet
 quantity, just like a traditional IPv4 address or network number,
 followed by the "/" (slash) character, followed by a decimal value
 between 0 and 32 that describes the number of significant bits.

Fuller & Li Best Current Practice [Page 5] RFC 4632 CIDR Address Strategy August 2006

 For example, the legacy "Class B" network 172.16.0.0, with an implied
 network mask of 255.255.0.0, is defined as the prefix 172.16.0.0/16,
 the "/16" indicating that the mask to extract the network portion of
 the prefix is a 32-bit value where the most significant 16 bits are
 ones and the least significant 16 bits are zeros.  Similarly, the
 legacy "Class C" network number 192.168.99.0 is defined as the prefix
 192.168.99.0/24; the most significant 24 bits are ones and the least
 significant 8 bits are zeros.
 Using classless prefixes with explicit prefix lengths allows much
 more flexible matching of address space blocks according to actual
 need.  Where formerly only three network sizes were available,
 prefixes may be defined to describe any power of two-sized block of
 between one and 2^32 end system addresses.  In practice, the
 unallocated pool of addresses is administered by the Internet
 Assigned Numbers Authority ([IANA]).  The IANA makes allocations from
 this pool to Regional Internet Registries, as required.  These
 allocations are made in contiguous bit-aligned blocks of 2^24
 addresses (a.k.a. /8 prefixes).  The Regional Internet Registries
 (RIRs), in turn, allocate or assign smaller address blocks to Local
 Internet Registries (LIRs) or Internet Service Providers (ISPs).
 These entities may make direct use of the assignment (as would
 commonly be the case for an ISP) or may make further sub-allocations
 of addresses to their customers.  These RIR address assignments vary
 according to the needs of each ISP or LIR.  For example, a large ISP
 might be allocated an address block of 2^17 addresses (a /15 prefix),
 whereas a smaller ISP may be allocated an address block of 2^11
 addresses (a /21 prefix).
 Note that the terms "allocate" and "assign" have specific meaning in
 the Internet address registry system; "allocate" refers to the
 delegation of a block of address space to an organization that is
 expected to perform further sub-delegations, and "assign" is used for
 sites that directly use (i.e., number individual hosts) the block of
 addresses received.
 The following table provides a convenient shortcut to all the CIDR
 prefix sizes, showing the number of addresses possible in each prefix
 and the number of prefixes of that size that may be numbered in the
 32-bit IPv4 address space:

Fuller & Li Best Current Practice [Page 6] RFC 4632 CIDR Address Strategy August 2006

     notation       addrs/block      # blocks
     --------       -----------     ----------
     n.n.n.n/32               1     4294967296    "host route"
     n.n.n.x/31               2     2147483648    "p2p link"
     n.n.n.x/30               4     1073741824
     n.n.n.x/29               8      536870912
     n.n.n.x/28              16      268435456
     n.n.n.x/27              32      134217728
     n.n.n.x/26              64       67108864
     n.n.n.x/25             128       33554432
     n.n.n.0/24             256       16777216    legacy "Class C"
     n.n.x.0/23             512        8388608
     n.n.x.0/22            1024        4194304
     n.n.x.0/21            2048        2097152
     n.n.x.0/20            4096        1048576
     n.n.x.0/19            8192         524288
     n.n.x.0/18           16384         262144
     n.n.x.0/17           32768         131072
     n.n.0.0/16           65536          65536    legacy "Class B"
     n.x.0.0/15          131072          32768
     n.x.0.0/14          262144          16384
     n.x.0.0/13          524288           8192
     n.x.0.0/12         1048576           4096
     n.x.0.0/11         2097152           2048
     n.x.0.0/10         4194304           1024
     n.x.0.0/9          8388608            512
     n.0.0.0/8         16777216            256    legacy "Class A"
     x.0.0.0/7         33554432            128
     x.0.0.0/6         67108864             64
     x.0.0.0/5        134217728             32
     x.0.0.0/4        268435456             16
     x.0.0.0/3        536870912              8
     x.0.0.0/2       1073741824              4
     x.0.0.0/1       2147483648              2
     0.0.0.0/0       4294967296              1    "default route"
 n is an 8-bit decimal octet value.  Point-to-point links are
 discussed in more detail in [RFC3021].
 x is a 1- to 7-bit value, based on the prefix length, shifted into
 the most significant bits of the octet and converted into decimal
 form; the least significant bits of the octet are zero.

Fuller & Li Best Current Practice [Page 7] RFC 4632 CIDR Address Strategy August 2006

 In practice, prefixes of length shorter than 8 have not been
 allocated or assigned to date, although routes to such short prefixes
 may exist in routing tables if or when aggressive aggregation is
 performed.  As of the writing of this document, no such routes are
 seen in the global routing system, but operator error and other
 events have caused some of them (i.e., 128.0.0.0/1 and 192.0.0.0/2)
 to be observed in some networks at some times in the past.

4. Address Assignment and Routing Aggregation

 Classless addressing and routing was initially developed primarily to
 improve the scaling properties of routing on the global Internet.
 Because the scaling of routing is very tightly coupled to the way
 that addresses are used, deployment of CIDR had implications for the
 way in which addresses were assigned.

4.1. Aggregation Efficiency and Limitations

 The only commonly understood method for reducing routing state on a
 packet-switched network is through aggregation of information.  For
 CIDR to succeed in reducing the size and growth rate of the global
 routing system, the IPv4 address assignment process needed to be
 changed to make possible the aggregation of routing information along
 topological lines.  Since, in general, the topology of the network is
 determined by the service providers who have built it, topologically
 significant address assignments are necessarily service-provider
 oriented.
 Aggregation is simple for an end site that is connected to one
 service provider: it uses address space assigned by its service
 provider, and that address space is a small piece of a larger block
 allocated to the service provider.  No explicit route is needed for
 the end site; the service provider advertises a single aggregate
 route for the larger block.  This advertisement provides reachability
 and routeability for all the customers numbered in the block.
 There are two, more complex, situations that reduce the effectiveness
 of aggregation:
 o  An organization that is multi-homed.  Because a multi-homed
    organization must be advertised into the system by each of its
    service providers, it is often not feasible to aggregate its
    routing information into the address space of any one of those
    providers.  Note that the organization still may receive its
    address assignment out of a service provider's address space
    (which has other advantages), but that a route to the
    organization's prefix is, in the most general case, explicitly
    advertised by all of its service providers.  For this reason, the

Fuller & Li Best Current Practice [Page 8] RFC 4632 CIDR Address Strategy August 2006

    global routing cost for a multi-homed organization is generally
    the same as it was prior to the adoption of CIDR.  A more detailed
    consideration of multi-homing practices can be found in [RFC4116].
 o  An organization that changes service provider but does not
    renumber.  This has the effect of "punching a hole" in one of the
    original service provider's aggregated route advertisements.  CIDR
    handles this situation by requiring that the newer service
    provider to advertise a specific advertisement for the re-homed
    organization; this advertisement is preferred over provider
    aggregates because it is a longer match.  To maintain efficiency
    of aggregation, it is recommended that an organization that
    changes service providers plan eventually to migrate its network
    into a an prefix assigned from its new provider's address space.
    To this end, it is recommended that mechanisms to facilitate such
    migration, such as dynamic host address assignment that uses
    [RFC2131]), be deployed wherever possible, and that additional
    protocol work be done to develop improved technology for
    renumbering.
 Note that some aggregation efficiency gain can still be had for
 multi-homed sites (and, in general, for any site composed of
 multiple, logical IPv4 networks); by allocating a contiguous power-
 of-two block address space to the site (as opposed to multiple,
 independent prefixes), the site's routing information may be
 aggregated into a single prefix.  Also, since the routing cost
 associated with assigning a multi-homed site out of a service
 provider's address space is no greater than the old method of
 sequential number assignment by a central authority, it makes sense
 to assign all end-site address space out of blocks allocated to
 service providers.
 It is also worthwhile to mention that since aggregation may occur at
 multiple levels in the system, it may still be possible to aggregate
 these anomalous routes at higher levels of whatever hierarchy may be
 present.  For example, if a site is multi-homed to two relatively
 small providers that both obtain connectivity and address space from
 the same large provider, then aggregation by the large provider of
 routes from the smaller networks will include all routes to the
 multi-homed site.  The feasibility of this sort of second-level
 aggregation depends on whether topological hierarchy exists among a
 site, its directly-connected providers, and other providers to which
 they are connected; it may be practical in some regions of the global
 Internet but not in others.

Fuller & Li Best Current Practice [Page 9] RFC 4632 CIDR Address Strategy August 2006

 Note: In the discussion and examples that follow, prefix notation is
 used to represent routing destinations.  This is used for
 illustration only and does not require that routing protocols use
 this representation in their updates.

4.2. Distributed Assignment of Address Space

 In the early days of the Internet, IPv4 address space assignment was
 performed by the central Network Information Center (NIC).  Class
 A/B/C network numbers were assigned in essentially arbitrary order,
 roughly according to the size of the organizations that requested
 them.  All assignments were recorded centrally, and no attempt was
 made to assign network numbers in a manner that would allow routing
 aggregation.
 When CIDR was originally deployed, the central assignment authority
 continued to exist but changed its procedures to assign large blocks
 of "Class C" network numbers to each service provider.  Each service
 provider, in turn, assigned bitmask-oriented subsets of the
 provider's address space to each customer.  This worked reasonably
 well, as long as the number of service providers was relatively small
 and relatively constant, but it did not scale well, as the number of
 service providers grew at a rapid rate.
 As the Internet started to expand rapidly in the 1990s, it became
 clear that a single, centralized address assignment authority was
 problematic.  This function began being de-centralized when address
 space assignment for European Internet sites was delegated in bit-
 aligned blocks of 16777216 addresses (what CIDR would later define as
 a /8) to the RIPE NCC ([RIPE]), effectively making it the first of
 the RIRs.  Since then, address assignment has been formally
 distributed as a hierarchical function with IANA, the RIRs, and the
 service providers.  Removing the bottleneck of a single organization
 having responsibility for the global Internet address space greatly
 improved the efficiency and response time for new assignments.
 Hierarchical delegation of addresses in this manner implies that
 sites with addresses assigned out of a given service provider are,
 for routing purposes, part of that service provider and will be
 routed via its infrastructure.  This implies that routing information
 about multi-homed organizations (i.e., organizations connected to
 more than one network service provider) will still need to be known
 by higher levels in the hierarchy.
 A historical perspective on these issues is described in [RFC1518].
 Additional discussion may also be found in [RFC3221].

Fuller & Li Best Current Practice [Page 10] RFC 4632 CIDR Address Strategy August 2006

5. Routing Implementation Considerations

 With the change from classful network numbers to classless prefixes,
 it is not possible to infer the network mask from the initial bit
 pattern of an IPv4 address.  This has implications for how routing
 information is stored and propagated.  Network masks or prefix
 lengths must be explicitly carried in routing protocols.  Interior
 routing protocols, such as OSPF [RFC2328], Intermediate System to
 Intermediate System (IS-IS) [RFC1195], RIPv2 [RFC2453], and Cisco
 Enhanced Interior Gateway Routing Protocol (EIGRP), and the BGP4
 exterior routing protocol [RFC4271], all support this functionality,
 having been developed or modified as part of the deployment of
 classless inter-domain routing during the 1990s.
 Older interior routing protocols, such as RIP [RFC1058], HELLO, and
 Cisco Interior Gateway Routing Protocol (IGRP), and older exterior
 routing protocols, such as Exterior Gateway Protocol (EGP) [RFC904],
 do not support explicit carriage of prefix length/mask and thus
 cannot be effectively used on the Internet other than in very limited
 stub configurations.  Although their use may be appropriate in simple
 legacy end-site configurations, they are considered obsolete and
 should NOT be used in transit networks connected to the global
 Internet.
 Similarly, routing and forwarding tables in layer-3 network equipment
 must be organized to store both prefix and prefix length or mask.
 Equipment that organizes its routing/forwarding information according
 to legacy Class A/B/C network/subnet conventions cannot be expected
 to work correctly on networks connected to the global Internet; use
 of such equipment is not recommended.  Fortunately, very little such
 equipment is in use today.

5.1. Rules for Route Advertisement

 1.  Forwarding in the Internet is done on a longest-match basis.
     This implies that destinations that are multi-homed relative to a
     routing domain must always be explicitly announced into that
     routing domain (i.e., they cannot be summarized).  If a network
     is multi-homed, all of its paths into a routing domain that is
     "higher" in the hierarchy of networks must be known to the
     "higher" network).
 2.  A router that generates an aggregate route for multiple, more-
     specific routes must discard packets that match the aggregate
     route, but not any of the more-specific routes.  In other words,
     the "next hop" for the aggregate route should be the null
     destination.  This is necessary to prevent forwarding loops when
     some addresses covered by the aggregate are not reachable.

Fuller & Li Best Current Practice [Page 11] RFC 4632 CIDR Address Strategy August 2006

 Note that during failures, partial routing of traffic to a site that
 takes its address space from one service provider but that is
 actually reachable only through another (i.e., the case of a site
 that has changed service providers) may occur because such traffic
 will be forwarded along the path advertised by the aggregated route.
 Rule #2 will prevent packet misdelivery by causing such traffic to be
 discarded by the advertiser of the aggregated route, but the output
 of "traceroute" and other similar tools will suggest that a problem
 exists within that network rather than in the network that is no
 longer advertising the more-specific prefix.  This may be confusing
 to those trying to diagnose connectivity problems; see the example in
 Section 6.2 for details.  A solution to this perceived "problem" is
 beyond the scope of this document; it lies with better education of
 the user/operator community, not in routing technology.
 An implementation following these rules should also be generalized,
 so that an arbitrary network number and mask are accepted for all
 routing destinations.  The only outstanding constraint is that the
 mask must be left contiguous.  Note that the degenerate route to
 prefix 0.0.0.0/0 is used as a default route and MUST be accepted by
 all implementations.  Further, to protect against accidental
 advertisements of this route via the inter-domain protocol, this
 route should only be advertised to another routing domain when a
 router is explicitly configured to do so, never as a non-configured,
 "default" option.

5.2. How the Rules Work

 Rule #1 guarantees that the forwarding algorithm used is consistent
 across routing protocols and implementations.  Multi-homed networks
 are always explicitly advertised by every service provider through
 which they are routed, even if they are a specific subset of one
 service provider's aggregate (if they are not, they clearly must be
 explicitly advertised).  It may seem as if the "primary" service
 provider could advertise the multi-homed site implicitly as part of
 its aggregate, but longest-match forwarding causes this not to work.
 More details are provided in [RFC4116].
 Rule #2 guarantees that no routing loops form due to aggregation.
 Consider a site that has been assigned 192.168.64/19 by its "parent"
 provider, which has 192.168.0.0/16.  The "parent" network will
 advertise 192.168.0.0/16 to the "child" network.  If the "child"
 network were to lose internal connectivity to 192.168.65.0/24 (which
 is part of its aggregate), traffic from the "parent" to the to the
 "child" destined for 192.168.65.1 will follow the "child's"
 advertised route.  When that traffic gets to the "child", however,
 the child *must not* follow the route 192.168.0.0/16 back up to the
 "parent", since that would result in a forwarding loop.  Rule #2 says

Fuller & Li Best Current Practice [Page 12] RFC 4632 CIDR Address Strategy August 2006

 that the "child" may not follow a less-specific route for a
 destination that matches one of its own aggregated routes (typically,
 this is implemented by installing a "discard" or "null" route for all
 aggregated prefixes that one network advertises to another).  Note
 that handling of the "default" route (0.0.0.0/0) is a special case of
 this rule; a network must not follow the default to destinations that
 are part of one of its aggregated advertisements.

5.3. A Note on Prefix Filter Formats

 Systems that process route announcements must be able to verify that
 information that they receive is acceptable according to policy
 rules.  Implementations that filter route advertisements must allow
 masks or prefix lengths in filter elements.  Thus, filter elements
 that formerly were specified as
    accept 172.16.0.0
    accept 172.25.120.0.0
    accept 172.31.0.0
    deny 10.2.0.0
    accept 10.0.0.0
 now look something like this:
    accept 172.16.0.0/16
    accept 172.25.0.0/16
    accept 172.31.0.0/16
    deny 10.2.0.0/16
    accept 10.0.0.0/8
 This is merely making explicit the network mask that was implied by
 the Class A/B/C classification of network numbers.  It is also useful
 to enhance filtering capability to allow the match of a prefix and
 all more-specific prefixes with the same bit pattern; fortunately,
 this functionality has been implemented by most vendors of equipment
 used on the Internet.

5.4. Responsibility for and Configuration of Aggregation

 Under normal circumstances, a routing domain (or "Autonomous System")
 that has been allocated or assigned a set of prefixes has sole
 responsibility for aggregation of those prefixes.  In the usual case,
 the AS will install configuration in one or more of its routers to
 generate aggregate routes based on more-specific routes known to its
 internal routing system.  These aggregate routes are advertised into
 the global routing system by the border routers for the routing
 domain.  The more-specific internal routes that overlap with the
 aggregate routes should not be advertised globally.  In some cases,

Fuller & Li Best Current Practice [Page 13] RFC 4632 CIDR Address Strategy August 2006

 an AS may wish to delegate aggregation responsibility to another AS
 (for example, a customer may wish for its service provider to
 generate aggregated routing information on its behalf); in such
 cases, aggregation is performed by a router in the second AS
 according to the routes that it receives from the first, combined
 with configured policy information describing how those routes should
 be aggregated.
 Note that one provider may choose to perform aggregation on the
 routes it receives from another without explicit agreement; this is
 termed "proxy aggregation".  This can be a useful tool for reducing
 the amount of routing state that an AS must carry and propagate to
 its customers and neighbors.  However, proxy aggregation can also
 create unintended consequences in traffic engineering.  Consider what
 happens if both AS 2 and 3 receive routes from AS 1 but AS 2 performs
 proxy aggregation while AS 3 does not.  Other ASes that receive
 transit routing information from both AS 2 and AS 3 will see an
 inconsistent view of the routing information originated by AS 1.
 This may cause an unexpected shift of traffic toward AS 1 through AS
 3 for AS 3's customers and any others receiving transit routes from
 AS 3.  Because proxy aggregation can cause unanticipated consequences
 for parts of the Internet that have no relationship with either the
 source of the aggregated routes or the party providing aggregation,
 it should be used with extreme caution.
 Configuration of the routes to be combined into aggregates is an
 implementation of routing policy and requires some manually
 maintained information.  As an addition to the information that must
 be maintained for a set of routeable prefixes, aggregation
 configuration is typically just a line or two defining the range of
 the block of IPv4 addresses to be aggregated.  A site performing its
 own aggregation is doing so for address blocks that it has been
 assigned; a site performing aggregation on behalf of another knows
 this information because of an agreement to delegate aggregation.
 Assuming that the best common practice for network administrators is
 to exchange lists of prefixes to accept from each other,
 configuration of aggregation information does not introduce
 significant additional administrative overhead.

Fuller & Li Best Current Practice [Page 14] RFC 4632 CIDR Address Strategy August 2006

 The generation of an aggregate route is usually specified either
 statically or in response to learning an active dynamic route for a
 prefix contained within the aggregate route.  If such dynamic
 aggregate route advertisement is done, care should be taken that
 routes are not excessively added or withdrawn (known as "route
 flapping").  In general, a dynamic aggregate route advertisement is
 added when at least one component of the aggregate becomes reachable
 and it is withdrawn only when all components become unreachable.
 Properly configured, aggregated routes are more stable than non-
 aggregated routes and thus improve global routing stability.
 Implementation note: Aggregation of the "Class D" (multicast) address
 space is beyond the scope of this document.

5.5. Route Propagation and Routing Protocol Considerations

 Prior to the original deployment of CIDR, common practice was to
 propagate routes learned via exterior routing protocols (i.e., EGP or
 BGP) through a site's interior routing protocol (typically, OSPF,
 IS-IS, or RIP).  This was done to ensure that consistent and correct
 exit points were chosen for traffic to be sent to a destination
 learned through those protocols.  Four evolutionary effects -- the
 advent of CIDR, explosive growth of global routing state, widespread
 adoption of BGP4, and a requirement to propagate full path
 information -- have combined to deprecate that practice.  To ensure
 proper path propagation and prevent inter-AS routing inconsistency
 (BGP4's loop detection/prevention mechanism requires full path
 propagation), transit networks must use internal BGP (iBGP) for
 carrying routes learned from other providers both within and through
 their networks.

6. Example of New Address Assignments and Routing

6.1. Address Delegation

 Consider the block of 524288 (2^19) addresses, beginning with
 10.24.0.0 and ending with 10.31.255.255, allocated to a single
 network provider, "PA".  This is equivalent in size to a block of
 2048 legacy "Class C" network numbers (or /24s).  A classless route
 to this block would be described as 10.24.0.0 with a mask of
 255.248.0.0 and the prefix 10.24.0.0/13.
 Assume that this service provider connects six sites in the following
 order (significant because it demonstrates how temporary "holes" may
 form in the service provider's address space):

Fuller & Li Best Current Practice [Page 15] RFC 4632 CIDR Address Strategy August 2006

 o  "C1", requiring fewer than 2048 addresses (/21 or 8 x /24)
 o  "C2", requiring fewer than 4096 addresses (/20 or 16 x /24)
 o  "C3", requiring fewer than 1024 addresses (/22 or 4 x /24)
 o  "C4", requiring fewer than 1024 addresses (/22 or 4 x /24)
 o  "C5", requiring fewer than 512 addresses (/23 or 2 x /24)
 o  "C6", requiring fewer than 512 addresses (/23 or 2 x /24)
 In all cases, the number of IPv4 addresses "required" by each site is
 assumed to allow for significant growth.  The service provider
 delegates its address space as follows:
 o  C1.  assign 10.24.0 through 10.24.7.  This block of networks is
    described by the route 10.24.0.0/21 (mask 255.255.248.0).
 o  C2.  Assign 10.24.16 through 10.24.31.  This block is described by
    the route 10.24.16.0/20 (mask 255.255.240.0).
 o  C3.  Assign 10.24.8 through 10.24.11.  This block is described by
    the route 10.24.8.0/22 (mask 255.255.252.0).
 o  C4.  Assign 10.24.12 through 10.24.15.  This block is described by
    the route 10.24.12.0/22 (mask 255.255.252.0).
 o  C5.  Assign 10.24.32 and 10.24.33.  This block is described by the
    route 10.24.32.0/23 (mask 255.255.254.0).
 o  C6.  Assign 10.24.34 and 10.24.35.  This block is described by the
    route 10.24.34.0/23 (mask 255.255.254.0).
 These six sites should be represented as six prefixes of varying size
 within the provider's IGP.  If, for some reason, the provider uses an
 obsolete IGP that doesn't support classless routing or variable-
 length subnets, then explicit routes for all /24s will have to be
 carried.
 To make this example more realistic, assume that C4 and C5 are multi-
 homed through some other service provider, "PB".  Further assume the
 existence of a site, "C7", that was originally connected to "RB" but
 that has moved to "PA".  For this reason, it has a block of network
 numbers that are assigned out PB's block of (the next) 2048 x /24.
 o  C7.  Assign 10.32.0 through 10.32.15.  This block is described by
    the route 10.32.0.0/20 (mask 255.255.240.0).

Fuller & Li Best Current Practice [Page 16] RFC 4632 CIDR Address Strategy August 2006

 For the multi-homed sites, assume that C4 is advertised as primary
 via "RA" and secondary via "RB"; and that C5 is primary via "RB" and
 secondary via "RA".  In addition, assume that "RA" and "RB" are both
 connected to the same transit service provider, "BB".
 Graphically, this topology looks something like this:
 10.24.0.0 -- 10.24.7.0__         __10.32.0.0 - 10.32.15.0
 C1: 10.24.0.0/21        \       /  C7: 10.32.0.0/20
                          \     /
                           +----+                              +----+
 10.24.16.0 - 10.24.31.0_  |    |                              |    |
 C2: 10.24.16.0/20       \ |    |  _10.24.12.0 - 10.24.15.0__  |    |
                          \|    | / C4: 10.24.12.0/20        \ |    |
                           |    |/                            \|    |
 10.24.8.0 - 10.24.11.0___/| PA |\                             | PB |
 C3: 10.24.8.0/22          |    | \__10.24.32.0 - 10.24.33.0___|    |
                           |    |    C5: 10.24.32.0/23         |    |
                           |    |                              |    |
 10.24.34.0 - 10.24.35.0__/|    |                              |    |
 C6: 10.24.34.0/23         |    |                              |    |
                           +----+                              +----+
                             ||                                  ||
 routing advertisements:     ||                                  ||
                             ||                                  ||
         10.24.12.0/22 (C4)  ||              10.24.12.0/22 (C4)  ||
         10.32.0.0/20 (C7)   ||              10.24.32.0/23 (C5)  ||
         10.24.0.0/13 (PA)   ||              10.32.0.0/13 (PB)   ||
                             ||                                  ||
                             VV                                  VV
                          +---------- BACKBONE NETWORK BB ----------+

6.2. Routing Advertisements

 To follow rule #1, PA will need to advertise the block of addresses
 that it was given and C7.  Since C4 is multi-homed and primary
 through PA, it must also be advertised.  C5 is multi-homed and
 primary through PB.  In principle (and in the example above), it need
 not be advertised, since longest match by PB will automatically
 select PB as primary and the advertisement of PA's aggregate will be
 used as a secondary.  In actual practice, C5 will normally be
 advertised via both providers.
 Advertisements from "PA" to "BB" will be
    10.24.12.0/22 primary    (advertises C4)
    10.32.0.0/20 primary     (advertises C7)
    10.24.0.0/13 primary     (advertises remainder of PA)

Fuller & Li Best Current Practice [Page 17] RFC 4632 CIDR Address Strategy August 2006

 For PB, the advertisements must also include C4 and C5, as well as
 its block of addresses.
 Advertisements from "PB" to "BB" will be
    10.24.12.0/22 secondary  (advertises C4)
    10.24.32.0/23 primary    (advertises C5)
    10.32.0.0/13 primary     (advertises remainder of RB)
 To illustrate the problem diagnosis issue mentioned in Section 5.1,
 consider what happens if PA loses connectivity to C7 (the site that
 is assigned out of PB's space).  In a stateful protocol, PA will
 announce to BB that 10.32.0.0/20 has become unreachable.  Now, when
 BB flushes this information out of its routing table, any future
 traffic sent through it for this destination will be forwarded to PB
 (where it will be dropped according to Rule #2) by virtue of PB's
 less-specific match, 10.32.0.0/13.  Although this does not cause an
 operational problem (C7 is unreachable in any case), it does create
 some extra traffic across "BB" (and may also prove confusing to
 someone trying to debug the outage with "traceroute").  A mechanism
 to cache such unreachable state might be nice, but it is beyond the
 scope of this document.

7. Domain Name Service Considerations

 One aspect of Internet services that was notably affected by the move
 to CIDR was the mechanism used for address-to-name translation:  the
 IN-ADDR.ARPA zone of the domain system.  Because this zone is
 delegated on octet boundaries only, the move to an address assignment
 plan that uses bitmask-oriented addressing caused some increase in
 work for those who maintain parts of the IN-ADDR.ARPA zone.
 A description of techniques to populate the IN-ADDR.ARPA zone when
 and used address that blocks that do not align to octet boundaries is
 described in [RFC2317].

8. Transition to a Long-Term Solution

 CIDR was designed to be a short-term solution to the problems of
 routing state and address depletion on the IPv4 Internet.  It does
 not change the fundamental Internet routing or addressing
 architectures.  It is not expected to affect any plans for transition
 to a more long-term solution except, perhaps, by delaying the urgency
 of developing such a solution.

Fuller & Li Best Current Practice [Page 18] RFC 4632 CIDR Address Strategy August 2006

9. Analysis of CIDR's Effect on Global Routing State

 When CIDR was first proposed in the early 1990s, the original authors
 made some observations about the growth rate of global routing state
 and offered projections on how CIDR deployment would, hopefully,
 reduce what appeared to be exponential growth to a more sustainable
 rate.  Since that deployment, an ongoing effort, called "The CIDR
 Report" [CRPT], has attempted to quantify and track that growth rate.
 What follows is a brief summary of the CIDR report as of March 2005,
 with an attempt to explain the various patterns and changes of growth
 rate that have occurred since measurements of the size of global
 routing state began in 1988.
 When the graph of "Active BGP Table Entries" [CBGP] is examined,
 there appear to be several different growth trends with distinct
 inflection points reflecting changes in policy and practice.  The
 trends and events that are believed to have caused them were as
 follows:
 1.  Exponential growth at the far left of the graph.  This represents
     the period of early expansion and commercialization of the former
     research network, from the late 1980s through approximately 1994.
     The major driver for this growth was a lack of aggregation
     capability for transit providers, and the widespread use of
     legacy Class C allocations for end sites.  Each time a new site
     was connected to the global Internet, one or more new routing
     entries were generated.
 2.  Acceleration of the exponential trend in late 1993 and early 1994
     as CIDR "supernet" blocks were first assigned by the NIC and
     routed as separate legacy class-C networks by service provider.
 3.  A sharp drop in 1994 as BGP4 deployment by providers allowed
     aggregation of the "supernet" blocks.  Note that the periods of
     largest declines in the number of routing table entries typically
     correspond to the weeks following each meeting of the IETF CIDR
     Deployment Working Group.
 4.  Roughly linear growth from mid-1994 to early 1999 as CIDR-based
     address assignments were made and aggregated routes added
     throughout the network.
 5.  A new period of exponential growth again from early 1999 until
     2001 as the "high-tech bubble" fueled both rapid expansion of the
     Internet, as well as a large increase in more-specific route
     advertisements for multi-homing and traffic engineering.

Fuller & Li Best Current Practice [Page 19] RFC 4632 CIDR Address Strategy August 2006

 6.  Flattening of growth through 2001 caused by a combination of the
     "dot-com bust", which caused many organizations to cease
     operations, and the "CIDR police" [CPOL] work aimed at improving
     aggregation efficiency.
 7.  Roughly linear growth through 2002 and 2003.  This most likely
     represents a resumption of the "normal" growth rate observed
     before the "bubble", as well as an end to the "CIDR Police"
     effort.
 8.  A more recent trend of exponential growth beginning in 2004.  The
     best explanation would seem to be an improvement of the global
     economy driving increased expansion of the Internet and the
     continued absence of the "CIDR Police" effort, which previously
     served as an educational tool for new providers to improve
     aggregation efficiency.  There have also been some cases where
     service providers have deliberately de-aggregated prefixes in an
     attempt to mitigate security problems caused by conflicting route
     advertisements (see Section 12).  Although this behavior may
     solve the short-term problems seen by such providers, it is
     fundamentally non-scalable and quite detrimental to the community
     as a whole.  In addition, there appear to be many providers
     advertising both their allocated prefixes and all the /24
     components thereof, probably due to a lack of consistent current
     information about recommended routing configuration.

10. Conclusions and Recommendations

 In 1992, when CIDR was first developed, there were serious problems
 facing the continued growth of the Internet.  Growth in routing state
 complexity and the rapid increase in consumption of address space
 made it appear that one or both problems would preclude continued
 growth of the Internet within a few short years.
 Deployment of CIDR, in combination with BGP4's support for carrying
 classless prefix routes, alleviated the short-term crisis.  It was
 only through a concerted effort by both the equipment manufacturers
 and the provider community that this was achieved.  The threat (and,
 perhaps in some cases, actual implementation of) charging networks
 for advertising prefixes may have offered an additional incentive to
 share the address space, and thus the associated costs of advertising
 routes to service providers.
 The IPv4 routing system architecture carries topology information
 based on aggregate address advertisements and a collection of more-
 specific advertisements that are associated with traffic engineering,
 multi-homing, and local configuration.  As of March 2005, the base
 aggregate address load in the routing system has some 75,000 entries.

Fuller & Li Best Current Practice [Page 20] RFC 4632 CIDR Address Strategy August 2006

 Approximately 85,000 additional entries are more specific entries of
 this base "root" collection.  There is reason to believe that many of
 these additional entries exist to solve problems of regional or even
 local scope and should not need to be globally propagated.
 An obvious question to ask is whether CIDR can continue to be a
 viable approach to keeping global routing state growth and address
 space depletion at sustainable rates.  Recent measurements indicate
 that exponential growth has resumed, but further analysis suggests
 that this trend can be mitigated by a more active effort to educate
 service providers as to efficient aggregation strategies and proper
 equipment configuration.  Looking farther forward, there is a clear
 need for better multi-homing technology that does not require global
 routing state for each site and for methods of performing traffic
 load balancing that do not require adding even more state.  Without
 such developments and in the absence of major architectural change,
 aggregation is the only tool available for making routing scale in
 the global Internet.

11. Status Updates to CIDR Documents

 This memo renders obsolete and requests re-classification as Historic
 the following RFCs describing CIDR usage and deployment:
 o  RFC 1467: Status of CIDR Deployment in the Internet
    This Informational RFC described the status of CIDR deployment in
    1993.  As of 2005, CIDR has been thoroughly deployed, so this
    status note only provides a historical data point.
 o  RFC 1481: IAB Recommendation for an Intermediate Strategy to
    Address the Issue of Scaling
    This very short Informational RFC described the IAB's endorsement
    of the use of CIDR to address scaling issues.  Because the goal of
    RFC 1481 has been achieved, it is now only of historical value.
 o  RFC 1482: Aggregation Support in the NSFNET Policy-Based Routing
    Database
    This Informational RFC describes plans for support of route
    aggregation, as specified by CIDR, on the NSFNET.  Because the
    NSFNET has long since ceased to exist and CIDR has been
    ubiquitously deployed, RFC 1482 now only has historical relevance.
 o  RFC 1517: Applicability Statement for the Implementation of
    Classless Inter-Domain Routing (CIDR)

Fuller & Li Best Current Practice [Page 21] RFC 4632 CIDR Address Strategy August 2006

    This Standards Track RFC described where CIDR was expected to be
    required and where it was expected to be (strongly) recommended.
    With the full deployment of CIDR on the Internet, situations where
    CIDR is not required are of only historical interest.
 o  RFC 1518: An Architecture for IP Address Allocation with CIDR
    This Standards Track RFC discussed routing and address aggregation
    considerations at some length.  Some of these issues are
    summarized in this document in section Section 3.1.  Because
    address assignment policies and procedures now reside mainly with
    the RIRs, it is not appropriate to try to document those practices
    in a Standards Track RFC.  In addition, [RFC3221] also describes
    many of the same issues from point of view of the routing system.
 o  RFC 1520: Exchanging Routing Information Across Provider
    Boundaries in the CIDR Environment
    This Informational RFC described transition scenarios where CIDR
    was not fully supported for exchanging route information between
    providers.  With the full deployment of CIDR on the Internet, such
    scenarios are no longer operationally relevant.
 o  RFC 1817: CIDR and Classful Routing
    This Informational RFC described the implications of CIDR
    deployment in 1995; it notes that formerly-classful addresses were
    to be allocated using CIDR mechanisms and describes the use of a
    default route for non-CIDR-aware sites.  With the full deployment
    of CIDR on the Internet, such scenarios are no longer
    operationally relevant.
 o  RFC 1878: Variable Length Subnet Table For IPv4
    This Informational RFC provided a table of pre-calculated subnet
    masks and address counts for each subnet size.  With the
    incorporation of a similar table into this document (see Section
    3.1), it is no longer necessary to document it in a separate RFC.
 o  RFC 2036: Observations on the use of Components of the Class A
    Address Space within the Internet
    This Informational RFC described several operational issues
    associated with the allocation of classless prefixes from
    previously-classful address space.  With the full deployment of
    CIDR on the Internet and more than half a dozen years of
    experience making classless prefix allocations out of historical
    "Class A" address space, this RFC now has only historical value.

Fuller & Li Best Current Practice [Page 22] RFC 4632 CIDR Address Strategy August 2006

12. Security Considerations

 The introduction of routing protocols that support classless prefixes
 and a move to a forwarding model that mandates that more-specific
 (longest-match) routes be preferred when they overlap with routes to
 less-specific prefixes introduces at least two security concerns:
 1.  Traffic can be hijacked by advertising a prefix for a given
     destination that is more specific than the aggregate that is
     normally advertised for that destination.  For example, assume
     that a popular end system with the address 192.168.17.100 is
     connected to a service provider that advertises 192.168.16.0/20.
     A malicious network operator interested in intercepting traffic
     for this site might advertise, or at least attempt to advertise,
     192.168.17.0/24 into the global routing system.  Because this
     prefix is more specific than the "normal" prefix, traffic will be
     diverted away from the legitimate end system and to the network
     owned by the malicious operator.  Prior to the advent of CIDR, it
     was possible to induce traffic from some parts of the network to
     follow a false advertisement that exactly matched a particular
     network number; CIDR makes this problem somewhat worse, since
     longest-match routing generally causes all traffic to prefer
     more-specific routes over less-specific routes.  The remedy for
     the CIDR-based attack, though, is the same as for a pre-CIDR-
     based attack: establishment of trust relationships between
     providers, coupled with and strong route policy filters at
     provider borders.  Unfortunately, the implementation of such
     filters is difficult in the highly de-centralized Internet.  As a
     workaround, many providers do implement generic filters that set
     upper bounds, derived from RIR guidelines for the sizes of blocks
     that they allocate, on the lengths of prefixes that are accepted
     from other providers.  Note that "spammers" have been observed
     using this sort of attack to hijack address space temporarily in
     order to hide the origin of the traffic ("spam" email messages)
     that they generate.
 2.  Denial-of-service attacks can be launched against many parts of
     the Internet infrastructure by advertising a large number of
     routes into the system.  Such an attack is intended to cause
     router failures by overflowing routing and forwarding tables.  A
     good example of a non-malicious incident that caused this sort of
     failure was the infamous "AS 7007" event [7007], where a router
     mis-configuration by an operator caused a huge number of invalid
     routes to be propagated through the global routing system.
     Again, this sort of attack is not really new with CIDR; using
     legacy Class A/B/C routes, it was possible to advertise a maximum
     of 16843008 unique network numbers into the global routing
     system, a number that is sufficient to cause problems for even

Fuller & Li Best Current Practice [Page 23] RFC 4632 CIDR Address Strategy August 2006

     the most modern routing equipment made in 2005.  What is
     different is that the moderate complexity of correctly
     configuring routers in the presence of CIDR tends to make
     accidental "attacks" of this sort more likely.  Measures to
     prevent this sort of attack are much the same as those described
     above for the hijacking, with the addition that best common
     practice is also to configure a reasonable maximum number of
     prefixes that a border router will accept from its neighbors.
 Note that this is not intended to be an exhaustive analysis of the
 sorts of attacks that CIDR makes easier; a more comprehensive
 analysis of security vulnerabilities in the global routing system is
 beyond the scope of this document.

13. Acknowledgements

 The authors wish to express appreciation to the other original
 authors of RFC 1519 (Kannan Varadhan, Jessica Yu); to the ROAD group,
 with whom many of the ideas behind CIDR were inspired and developed;
 and to the early reviewers of this re-spun version of the document
 (Barry Greene, Danny McPherson, Dave Meyer, Eliot Lear, Bill Norton,
 Ted Seely, Philip Smith, Pekka Savola), whose comments, corrections,
 and suggestions were invaluable.  We would especially like to thank
 Geoff Huston for contributions well above and beyond the call of
 duty.

Fuller & Li Best Current Practice [Page 24] RFC 4632 CIDR Address Strategy August 2006

14. References

14.1. Normative References

 [RFC791]   Postel, J., "Internet Protocol", STD 5, RFC 791, September
            1981.

14.2. Informative References

 [7007]     "NANOG mailing list discussion of the "AS 7007" incident",
            <http://www.merit.edu/mail.archives/nanog/1997-04/
            msg00340.html>.
 [CBGP]     "Graph: Active BGP Table Entries, 1988 to Present",
            <http://bgp.potaroo.net/as4637/>.
 [CPOL]     "CIDR Police - Please Pull Over and Show Us Your BGP",
            <http://www.nanog.org/mtg-0302/cidr.html>.
 [CRPT]     "The CIDR Report", <http://www.cidr-report.org/>.
 [IANA]     "Internet Assigned Numbers Authority",
            <http://www.iana.org>.
 [LWRD]     "The Long and Winding Road",
            <http://rms46.vlsm.org/1/42.html>.
 [NRO]      "Number Resource Organization", <http://www.nro.net>.
 [RFC904]   Mills, D., "Exterior Gateway Protocol formal
            specification", RFC 904, April 1 1984.
 [RFC1058]  Hedrick, C., "Routing Information Protocol", RFC 1058,
            June 1988.
 [RFC1195]  Callon, R., "Use of OSI IS-IS for routing in TCP/IP and
            dual environments", RFC 1195, December 1990.
 [RFC1338]  Fuller, V., Li, T., Yu, J., and K. Varadhan,
            "Supernetting: an Address Assignment and Aggregation
            Strategy", RFC 1338, June 1992.
 [RFC1380]  Gross, P. and P. Almquist, "IESG Deliberations on Routing
            and Addressing", RFC 1380, November 1992.
 [RFC1518]  Rekhter, Y. and T. Li, "An Architecture for IP Address
            Allocation with CIDR", RFC 1518, September 1993.

Fuller & Li Best Current Practice [Page 25] RFC 4632 CIDR Address Strategy August 2006

 [RFC1519]  Fuller, V., Li, T., Yu, J., and K. Varadhan, "Classless
            Inter-Domain Routing (CIDR): an Address Assignment and
            Aggregation Strategy", RFC 1519, September 1993.
 [RFC2131]  Droms, R., "Dynamic Host Configuration Protocol", RFC
            2131, March 1997.
 [RFC2328]  Moy, J., "OSPF Version 2", STD 54, RFC 2328, April 1998.
 [RFC2317]  Eidnes, H., de Groot, G., and P. Vixie, "Classless IN-
            ADDR.ARPA delegation", BCP 20, RFC 2317, March 1998.
 [RFC2453]  Malkin, G., "RIP Version 2", STD 56, RFC 2453, November
            1998.
 [RFC3021]  Retana, A., White, R., Fuller, V., and D. McPherson,
            "Using 31-Bit Prefixes on IPv4 Point-to-Point Links", RFC
            3021, December 2000.
 [RFC3221]  Huston, G., "Commentary on Inter-Domain Routing in the
            Internet", RFC 3221, December 2001.
 [RFC4116]  Abley, J., Lindqvist, K., Davies, E., Black, B., and V.
            Gill, "IPv4 Multihoming Practices and Limitations", RFC
            4116, July 2005.
 [RFC4271]  Rekhter, Y., Li, T., and S. Hares, "A Border Gateway
            Protocol 4 (BGP-4)", RFC 4271, January 2006.
 [RIPE]     "RIPE Network Coordination Centre", <http://www.ripe.net>.

Authors' Addresses

 Vince Fuller
 170 W. Tasman Drive
 San Jose, CA  95134
 USA
 EMail: vaf@cisco.com
 Tony Li
 555 Del Rey Avenue
 Sunnyvale, CA 94085
 Email: tli@tropos.com

Fuller & Li Best Current Practice [Page 26] RFC 4632 CIDR Address Strategy August 2006

Full Copyright Statement

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 This document is subject to the rights, licenses and restrictions
 contained in BCP 78, and except as set forth therein, the authors
 retain all their rights.
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Acknowledgement

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Fuller & Li Best Current Practice [Page 27]

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