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The use of CIDR and VLSM not only prevents address waste,
but it also promotes route aggregation, or summarization. Without route summarization, Internet
backbone routing would likely have collapsed sometime before 1997.
The figure illustrates how route summarization reduces the
burden on upstream routers. This complex hierarchy of variable-sized networks and subnetworks is
summarized at various points using a prefix address until the entire network is
advertised as a single aggregate route: 200.199.48.0 /20.
Recall that this kind of route summarization, or
supernetting, is possible only if the network's routers run a classless routing protocol, such as OSPF or EIGRP.
Classless routing protocols carry the prefix length (subnet mask) with the 32-bit
address in routing updates. In the figure, the summary route that eventually reaches the
provider contains a 20-bit prefix common to all of the addresses in the organization,
200.199.48.0 /20 or 11001000 11000111 0001. For summarization to work properly, you must
carefully assign addresses in a hierarchical fashion so that summarized addresses
will share the same high-order bits.
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