IP Addressing Fundamentals

Address Management Issues for an Enterprise WAN

An end-user enterprise demonstrates some fairly consistent network attributes. For example, an enterprise wide-area network (WAN) should have a fairly secure perimeter. This implies that the borders are well-defined in the first place. The WAN, by virtue of its isolation from other, external networks, affords cocoon-like safety for the networked computing operations. The routers in this network spend much more of their time forwarding IP packets than they do tracking routes, simply because the network's limited scope results in a limited number of internal routes. If there is to be a connection to the Internet, all network addresses that lie outside the network can be treated using the concept of ...