Routing And Switching Questions
A subnet mask is a 32-bit number used in IP networking to divide an IP address into network and host portions. It is used in routing to determine the network portion of an IP address and to determine whether a destination IP address is on the same network or a different network. The subnet mask is compared with the destination IP address to perform a bitwise AND operation, which results in the network address. This network address is then used to determine the appropriate routing path for the packet.