of stateless address autoconfiguration. At first, the IETF recommended in as a best practice that all end sites receive a address allocation, however, criticism and reevaluation of actual needs and practices has led to more flexible allocation recommendations in suggesting a significantly smaller allocation for some sites, such as a block for home networks. This IPv6 subnetting reference lists the sizes for IPv6 subnetworks. Different types of network links may require different subnet sizes. The subnet mask separates the bits of the network identifier prefix from the bits of the interface identifier. Selecting a smaller prefix size results in fewer number of networks covered, but with more addresses within each network. 2001:0db8:0123:4567:89ab:cdef:1234:5678 |||| |||| |||| |||| |||| |||| |||| |||| |||| |||| |||| |||| |||| |||| |||| |||128 Single end-points and loopback |||| |||| |||| |||| |||| |||| |||| |||127 Point-to-point links (inter-router) |||| |||| |||| |||| |||| |||| |||| ||124 |||| |||| |||| |||| |||| |||| |||| |120 |||| |||| |||| |||| |||| |||| |||| 116 |||| |||| |||| |||| |||| |||| |||112 |||| |||| |||| |||| |||| |||| ||108 |||| |||| |||| |||| |||| |||| |104 |||| |||| |||| |||| |||| |||| 100 |||| |||| |||| |||| |||| |||96 |||| |||| |||| |||| |||| ||92 |||| |||| |||| |||| |||| |88 |||| |||| |||| |||| |||| 84 |||| |||| |||| |||| |||80 |||| |||| |||| |||| ||76 |||| |||| |||| |||| |72 |||| |||| |||| |||| 68 |||| |||| |||| |||64 Single LAN; default prefix size for SLAAC |||| |||| |||| ||60 Some (very limited) 6rd deployments (/60 = 16 /64 blocks) |||| |||| |||| |56 Minimal end sites assignment; e.g. home network (/56 = 256 /64 blocks) |||| |||| |||| 52 /52 block = 4096 /64 blocks |||| |||| |||48 Typical assignment for larger sites (/48 = 65536 /64 blocks) |||| |||| ||44 |||| |||| |40 |||| |||| 36 possible future local Internet registry (LIR) extra-small allocations |||| |||32 LIR minimum allocations |||| ||28 LIR medium allocations |||| |24 LIR large allocations |||| 20 LIR extra large allocations |||16 ||12 Regional Internet registry (RIR) allocations from IANA |8 4 Prefix aggregation CIDR provides fine-grained routing prefix aggregation. For example, if the first 20 bits of their network prefixes match, sixteen contiguous networks can be aggregated and advertised to a larger network as a single routing table entry. This reduces the number of routes that have to be