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Admin KnowledgeBase Subnetting to Increase
Articles & Tutorials Performance
Common for all OSes
Dial up Networking, ICS, Date Launched: Jun 23, 2005 There comes a time
RAS, ADSL Last Updated: Jun 23, 2005 when a network
Section: Articles & Tutorials :: General Networking becomes too big and
Direct Cable Connection
Author: Brien M. Posey performance begins
Networking
Printable Version to suffer as a result
General Networking Rating: 3.7/5 - 10 Votes of too much traffic.
Linux Integration
When that happens,
Network Troubleshooting 1 2 3 4 5 one of the ways that
Windows 2000 Rate this article you can solve the
Windows 2003 problem is by
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breaking the
network into smaller
Windows NT 4
pieces. There are
Windows XP several techniques
Wireless Networking for splitting a
network, but one of
Authors
the most effective
Hardware techniques is called
subnetting. In this
Links article, I will explain
what subnetting is,
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and how it works.
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What is a Subnet?
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Subnetting is basically just a way of splitting a TCP/IP network into smaller, more
manageable pieces. The basic idea is that if you have an excessive amount of traffic
flowing across your network, then that traffic can cause your network to run slowly.
When you subnet your network, you are splitting the network into a separate, but
interconnected network. That way, most of the network traffic will be isolated to the
subnet in which it originated. Of course you can still communicate across a subnet,
but the only time that traffic will cross subnet boundaries is when it is specifically
destined for a host residing in an alternate subnet.

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The main purpose of subnetting is to help relieve network congestion. Congestion

used to be a bigger problem than it is today because it was more common for
networks to use hubs than switches. When nodes on a network are connected
through a hub, the entire network acts as a single collision domain. What this means
is that if one PC sends a packet to another PC, every PC on the entire network sees
the packet. Each machine looks at the packet header, but ignores the packet if it
isn’t the intended recipient.

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The problem with this type of network is that if any two machines on the network
happen to send packets simultaneously, then the packets collide and are destroyed
in the collision. The two machines then wait a random amount of time and resend
the packets. The point is that an occasional collision is no big deal, but excessive
collisions can slow a network way down.

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Switches solve the excessive collision problem by directing packets directly from the
source machine to the destination machine. Using this technique combined with
caching practically eliminates collisions and allows a network to perform much better
than it ever could if it were using a hub. So let’s go back to my original question. Are
subnets still relevant for switched networks?

The answer is that it really just depends on how the network is laid out and how it is
performing. Keep in mind that a switch only helps performance when a packet is
destined for a specific PC. Broadcast traffic is still sent to every machine on the
network. If you’re running a switched network, then subnetting will help you if you
have a lot of broadcast network. Subnetting is also important if you have branch
offices that are connected by a slow WAN link.

Planning the Placement of Subnets

Before I show you how to go about subnetting your network, I want to talk for a
moment about planning. Although I guess you could just start creating random
subnets, you would probably do more harm than good, so it’s a good idea to take
some time and figure out what should be subnetted.

Initially, your subnet structure should mimic your network’s geographic structure.
Any facilities that are separated by WAN links should also be on separate subnets.
This isn’t an absolute requirement though. You can have one big subnet that spans
multiple facilities, but in most cases, your network will perform better if each facility
uses its own subnet.

Another consideration might be the concentration of users within a department. For

example, I used to work in an office in which thousands of users all worked in a
single building. For a long time, there were no external facilities. In an environment
like this, you can implement subnets, but the locations for those subnets might not
be so clear. I have seen some companies subnet by department, but this tends to be
a bad idea because it’s not uncommon for a department to move to another part of
the building. Worse yet, a department might move some of its employees, but not
others. A better solution is to rely on something that won’t change. For example, you
might subnet by floor (first floor, second floor, etc.), or by area (east wing, west
wing, etc.)

Hopefully, you are starting to come up with a plan for your organization, but there is
one more consideration that you need to make. You need to stop and think about
hardware placement. All of the subnets will have to be linked together through a
router (you probably don’t want to use the same router that connects your
organization to the outside world). Therefore, you will need to figure out what size
router you are going to need, how much that router will cost, where the router will
be placed, and where the router will connect to each subnet.

Likewise, each subnet will need its own hubs or switches. You defeat the purpose of
subnetting if multiple subnets are sharing a common hub.

One last consideration is server placement. It takes longer for a user to access a
server if that server is in a different subnet. The latency isn’t usually enough to be a
problem, but if you have hundreds of users constantly crossing a subnet to access a
server, then you might as well not even have subnetted your network because you
aren’t isolating much traffic.

There are a couple of solutions to this issue. One possible solution is that if you have
a server that services only one department, you might place the server into the
same subnet as the people who will be accessing it the most. If you have servers
that will be accessed by everyone in the organization, consider putting multiple NICs
into each server and binding each NIC to a separate subnet.

Another way that you can cut down on cross subnet traffic is by giving each subnet
its own domain controller. If you choose to do this though, be sure to define sites
through your Active Directory. That way, users will be forced to authenticate through

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a domain controller in their own subnet / site (unless that domain controller is unavailable, in which case an
alternate domain controller will be used).

Defining Subnets

So far I have talked a lot about the ways in which subnetting is used, but I haven’t really talked about what subnets
are or how they are created. Subnetting is simply a technique for breaking a big block of IP addresses into smaller
blocks that can be used to define separate networks. For example, suppose that you were able to obtain a class B
block of IP addresses. Imagine that the address block that you received was 146.100.x.x. If you owned this
particular block of addresses, your default subnet mask would be 255.255.0.0. This subnet mask tells TCP/IP that
the first two digits of the IP address (146.100) are the network number, and the last two numbers are the host ID
number. Since the last two numbers in the IP address can be used to identify individual hosts on the network, your
IP address range will allow your network to contain up to 65,534 hosts!

That probably sounds great at first, but placing sixty five thousand hosts on a single network segment would be
disastrous. If you have enough hosts to warrant using a class B address, you would probably be much better off
breaking your single class B address into multiple class C addresses.

The easiest way of doing this is to change the subnet mask from 255.255.0.0 to 255.255.255.0. This would tell
TCP/IP that the first three numbers in the IP address designate the network portion of the address and only the last
digit is being used as the host address. You would then pick a number for the third digit of the first set of IP
addresses. You would probably want to start with 0 if this were a real life situation. Therefore, your network number
would be 146.100.0 and your hosts on that network would use IP addresses ranging from 146.100.0.0 to
146.100.0.245. When you run out of addresses on that block of IP addresses, simply increment the third digit of the
IP address by 1 to define a new network segment. You can then create hosts with IP addresses ranging from
146.100.1.0 to 146.100.1.254.

Subnetting Class C Addresses

The technique that I just showed you works great if you want to evenly split a class A or a class B address block.
Sometimes though, you may need to split a class C address block, or may need to divide a Class A or a Class B
address in a way that would give you more or less addresses than you would get if you used the above technique.

In the above example, the numbers in the subnet mask were either 255 or they were zero. These numbers are
actually derived from eight bit binary values. In binary math, 00000000=0, and 11111111=255. When we changed
one of the numbers in the subnet mask from 0 to 255, we were borrowing eight bits from the address space. The
trick to creating other types of subnets is to understand that you do not have to work in eight bit increments.

Suppose for example that you owned the class C address block 192.168.42.x, and you needed to split it into five
subnets with 25 addresses each. Since this is a class C address, the host identifier portion of the IP address takes up
8 bits. If you want to subnet this address block, you will have to borrow some of the bits that are used for the host
identifier and use them for the network identifier.

To determine how many bits you will have to use for a subnet, use the formula 2X-2, where X is the number of bits
that you are using. For example, if you were to use 3 bits, then you could create six subnets (23-2=6). If you use
three bits for the subnet, then that leaves you with five bits for the host identifier. If you apply the 2X-2 formula to
the number of bits left for the host identifier, you will find that each subnet can contain up to 30 hosts (25-2=30).

As you will recall earlier when we subnetted the class B address, we had to increment the last portion of the network
identifier for each subnet. We have to do the same thing here, but doing so is a little more difficult. As you will
recall, the first three numbers in each IP address are 192.168.40. These numbers will remain constant. It’s only the
last number that we have to worry about. We have split the last number into three bits for the network identifier,
and five bits for the host identifier. We must now set the network identifier portion to 1. In binary form, it looks like
this:

001 00000

The 1 will be incremented for each individual subnet. There are six subnets in all, and they will look like this:

001 00000
010 00000

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011 00000
100 00000
101 00000
110 00000
111 00000

Now, you must determine the IP addresses that will fall into each subnet. The trick is to understand that the last five
bits are used for the host identifier. They range from 00000 to 11111. To determine the IP addresses in each
subnet, combine the network identifier with the host identifier and then convert it to decimal notation. For example,
for the 001 subnet, the bit range is 001 00000 to 001 11111. When you concatenate these numbers they appear as
00100000 and 00111111. Convert these numbers to decimal and they become 33 and 62. This means that the IP
address range for the first subnet is 192.168.40.33 to 192.168.40.62. You can repeat the process for the other
subnets to calculate the IP address ranges for them.

The last step in the process is to compute the subnet mask. The old 255.255.255.0 isn’t going to work anymore
because we borrowed three bits from the host identifier. The easiest way to come up with the subnet mask is to
express the last number in binary notation, where the three bits that we have borrowed are expressed as ones and
the bits that are being used for the host identifier are expressed as zero. This looks like: 11100000. Convert this
value to decimal notation and the value is 224. As you will recall, the original subnet mask was 255.255.255.0. To
create the new subnet mask, we simply replace the 0 with the new value (224). Our subnet mask becomes
255.255.255.224.

Conclusion

As you can see, splitting a network into multiple subnets can get to be a little complicated. However, if your network
is suffering from excessive traffic, then subnetting might be the answer that you are looking for.

About Brien M. Posey

Brien Posey is an award winning author who has written over 3,000 articles and written or contributed to 27 books.
You can visit Brien’s personal Web site at www.brienposey.com

Click here for Brien M. Posey 's section.

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