Unlocking the Mystery of CIDR: What It Means for Networking and the Internet

Meaning of

The meaning of ‘CIDR’ in Network/Internet is ‘Classless Inter-Domain Routing’.

Meaning of ‘CIDR’

CIDR, or Classless Inter-Domain Routing, is a system for efficiently routing network traffic. It is used by the Internet and many corporate networks to assign addresses to devices and routes for data to travel between them. CIDR was developed in 1993 as an alternative to the older classful addressing system that had been in place since 1981.

The traditional IP address assignment system used before CIDR was known as classful addressing. This method assigned different ranges of IP addresses to different classes of users or networks, so each device on the network had a unique address within its class. The problem with this approach was that it was inflexible and wasteful: large blocks of addresses were allocated to each class regardless of how many addresses were actually needed.

CIDR addressed these issues by introducing the concept of subnetting, which allows administrators to divide large blocks of IP addresses into smaller chunks called subnets. With CIDR, each subnet has its own unique range of IP addresses that can be used to assign individual devices or groups of devices on the network. This means that organizations can use only as many IP addresses as they need and are no longer tied down by the rigid allocations from the old classful addressing system.

CIDR also introduced support for hierarchical routing, which simplifies network management by allowing administrators to organize their networks more effectively. Instead of having all their devices connected directly together like a flat network, administrators can create hierarchies where each device can have multiple levels of parent and child nodes above and below it in the hierarchy. This makes route propagation much easier since packets only need to be routed through nodes at the same level within the hierarchy instead of having to traverse multiple levels if they were all connected together on a flat network.

In addition, CIDR also paved the way for route aggregation – when two or more routes are combined into one route – which reduces routing table sizes significantly because fewer entries are required per route than before. This improves performance and scalability since routers don’t need to store as much information about each route in order to determine how packets should be sent across networks.

Overall, CIDR has revolutionized how we manage our networks today; it has enabled us to make better use of our available resources while providing simpler management capabilities for administrators all over the world. By making use of subnetting and hierarchical routing, we can now create much more efficient networks that allow us to get more out of every device on our network without wasting any precious resources along the way.


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Author

  • Johnetta Belfield

    Johnetta Belfield is a professional writer and editor for AcronymExplorer.com, an online platform dedicated to providing comprehensive coverage of the world of acronyms, full forms, and the meanings behind the latest social media slang.

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