Answer Description

Wikipedia

A subnetwork or subnet is a logical subdivision of an IP network.: 1, 16  The practice of dividing a network into two or more networks is called subnetting. Computers that belong to the same subnet are addressed with an identical group of its most-significant bits of their IP addresses. This results in the logical division of an IP address into two fields: the network number or routing prefix, and the rest field or host identifier. The rest field is an identifier for a specific host or network interface. The routing prefix may be expressed as the first address of a network, written in Classless Inter-Domain Routing (CIDR) notation, followed by a slash character (/), and ending with the bit-length of the prefix. For example, 198.51.100.0/24 is the prefix of the Internet Protocol version 4 network starting at the given address, having 24 bits allocated for the network prefix, and the remaining 8 bits reserved for host addressing. Addresses in the range 198.51.100.0 to 198.51.100.255 belong to this network, with 198.51.100.255 as the subnet broadcast address. The IPv6 address specification 2001:db8::/32 is a large address block with 296 addresses, having a 32-bit routing prefix. For IPv4, a network may also be characterized by its subnet mask or netmask, which is the bitmask that, when applied by a bitwise AND operation to any IP address in the network, yields the routing prefix. Subnet masks are also expressed in dot-decimal notation like an IP address. For example, the prefix 198.51.100.0/24 would have the subnet mask 255.255.255.0. Traffic is exchanged