A structured addressing plan involves the concept of Variable Length Subnet Masking (VLSM), a technology that all of the modern routing protocols can easily handle. VLSM provides efficiency, as it disseminates an addressing plan that does not waste address space (i.e., it assigns only the number of addresses needed for a certain subnetwork). VLSM also accommodates efficient summarization. The most important benefits of VLSM and summarization include the following:
- Less CPU utilization on network devices
- Less memory utilization on network devices
- Smaller convergence domains