In the IPv4 IP address space, there are five classes: A, B, C, D and E. Each class has a specific range of IP addresses (and ultimately dictates the number of devices you can have on your network). Primarily, class A, B, and C are used by the majority of devices on the Internet. Class D and class E are for special uses.
The list below shows the five available IP classes, along with the number of networks each can support and the maximum number of hosts (devices) that can be on each of those networks. The four octets that make up an IP address are conventionally represented by a.b.c.d - such as 127.10.20.30.
Class A addresses are for networks with large number of total hosts. Class A allows for 126 networks by using the first octet for the network ID. The first bit in this octet, is always zero. The remaining seven bits in this octet complete the network ID. The 24 bits in the remaining three octets represent the hosts ID and allows for approximately 17 million hosts per network. Class A network number values begin at 1 and end at 127.
Class B addresses are for medium to large sized networks. Class B allows for 16,384 networks by using the first two octets for the network ID. The first two bits in the first octet are always 1 0. The remaining six bits, together with the second octet, complete the network ID. The 16 bits in the third and fourth octet represent host ID and allows for approximately 65,000 hosts per network. Class B network number values begin at 128 and end at 191.
Class C addresses are used in small local area networks (LANs). Class C allows for approximately 2 million networks by using the first three octets for the network ID. In a class C IP address, the first three bits of the first octet are always 1 1 0. And the remaining 21 bits of first three octets complete the network ID. The last octet (8 bits) represent the host ID and allows for 254 hosts per network. Class C network number values begins at 192 and end at 223.
Class D IP addresses are not allocated to hosts and are used for multicasting. Multicasting allows a single host to send a single stream of data to thousands of hosts across the Internet at the same time. It is often used for audio and video streaming, such as IP-based cable TV networks. Another example is the delivery of real-time stock market data from one source to many brokerage companies.
Within each network class, there are designated IP address that is reserved specifically for private/internal use only. This IP address cannot be used on Internet-facing devices as that are non-routable. For example, web servers and FTP servers must use non-private IP addresses. However, within your own home or business network, private IP addresses are assigned to your devices (such as workstations, printers, and file servers).
A classful network is an obsolete network addressing architecture used in the Internet from 1981 until the introduction of Classless Inter-Domain Routing (CIDR) in 1993. The method divides the IP address space for Internet Protocol version 4 (IPv4) into five address classes based on the leading four address bits. Classes A, B, and C provide unicast addresses for networks of three different network sizes. Class D is for multicast networking and the class E address range is reserved for future or experimental purposes.
Since its discontinuation, remnants of classful network concepts have remained in practice only in limited scope in the default configuration parameters of some network software and hardware components, most notably in the default configuration of subnet masks.
In the original address definition, the most significant eight bits of the 32-bit IPv4 address was the network number field which specified the particular network a host was attached to. The remaining 24 bits specified the local address, also called rest field (the rest of the address), which uniquely identified a host connected to that network.[1] This format was sufficient at a time when only a few large networks existed, such as the ARPANET (network number 10), and before the wide proliferation of local area networks (LANs). As a consequence of this architecture, the address space supported only a low number (254) of independent networks.
Before the introduction of address classes, the only address blocks available were these large blocks which later became known as Class A networks.[2] As a result, some organizations involved in the early development of the Internet received address space allocations far larger than they would ever need (16,777,216 IP addresses each). It became clear early in the growth of the network that this would be a critical scalability limitation.[citation needed]
Expansion of the network had to ensure compatibility with the existing address space and the IPv4 packet structure, and avoid the renumbering of the existing networks. The solution was to expand the definition of the network number field to include more bits, allowing more networks to be designated, each potentially having fewer hosts. Since all existing network numbers at the time were smaller than 64, they had only used the 6 least-significant bits of the network number field. Thus it was possible to use the most-significant bits of an address to introduce a set of address classes while preserving the existing network numbers in the first of these classes.
The first class, designated as Class A, contained all addresses in which the most significant bit is zero. The network number for this class is given by the next 7 bits, therefore accommodating 128 networks in total, including the zero network, and including the IP networks already allocated. A Class B network was a network in which all addresses had the two most-significant bits set to 1 and 0 respectively. For these networks, the network address was given by the next 14 bits of the address, thus leaving 16 bits for numbering host on the network for a total of 65536 addresses per network. Class C was defined with the 3 high-order bits set to 1, 1, and 0, and designating the next 21 bits to number the networks, leaving each network with 256 local addresses.
The leading bit sequence 111 designated an at-the-time unspecified addressing mode ("escape to extended addressing mode"),[3] which was later subdivided as Class D (1110) for multicast addressing, while leaving as reserved for future use the 1111 block designated as Class E.[4]
This architecture change extended the addressing capacity of the Internet but did not prevent IP address exhaustion. The problem was that many sites needed larger address blocks than a Class C network provided, and therefore they received a Class B block, which was in most cases much larger than required. Due to the rapid growth of the Internet, the pool of unassigned Class B addresses (214, or about 16,000) was rapidly being depleted. Starting in 1993, classful networking was replaced by Classless Inter-Domain Routing (CIDR),[5][6] in an attempt to solve this problem.
The number of addresses usable for addressing specific hosts in each network is always 2N - 2, where N is the number of rest field bits, and the subtraction of 2 adjusts for the use of the all-bits-zero host value to represent the network address and the all-bits-one host value for use as a broadcast address. Thus, for a Class C address with 8 bits available in the host field, the maximum number of hosts is 254.
Today, IP addresses are associated with a subnet mask. This was not required in a classful network because the mask was implied by the address itself; any network device would inspect the first few bits of the IP address to determine the class of the address and thus its netmask.
The blocks numerically at the start and end of classes A, B and C were originally reserved for special addressing or future features, i.e., 0.0.0.0/8 and 127.0.0.0/8 are reserved in former class A; 128.0.0.0/16 and 191.255.0.0/16 were reserved in former class B but are now available for assignment; 192.0.0.0/24 and 223.255.255.0/24 are reserved in former class C. While the 127.0.0.0/8 network is a Class A network, it is designated for loopback and cannot be assigned to a network.[8]
My question is when i declare two variables for example "int a, int b" inside main program, it takes 4+4 bytes with a particular two address some where in the memory. example "a is in the memory 0x248444 and b is in 0x248448".... in this case is fine....
After searching in internet, I found a book called "inside the C++ object model" but for basic understanding of memory difference about the variable declared in the instantiated class object and variable declared in main. someone please help me to make myself clear.
If an instance is located at address 0x248544, it will occupy exactly the byte at this address + the next subsequent ones. In such a simple class as above with out any further conditions, c will occupy the first four of these eight bytes, d the next four ones.
Now, sizeof(C) will be 16(!) (provided pointers require 8 bytes storage, as on modern 64-bit hardware). Why? The class gets an additional pointer to a vtable, which is normally the first (but invisible) member of class C.
Additionally, C++ allows to reorder the members of a class:Whereas in C, if struct member a is declared before b, then a must be placed in front of b in memory, too, this is in C++ only required for members of the same accessibility!
You can consider class instance as an envelop for its member variables. Size of class instance is the sum of sizes of its member variables plus optional padding between them. Often (inheritance and polymorphism can mess with this) the address of the first member variable is the same as the address of class instance. You can take addresses of members and investigate them in debugger to see how it works. E.g.
In short, a member function can't be stored in a normal function pointer as it need to be handed a this pointer to the current class. A static member function works like a normal function as it need no this pointer.
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