Patricia/radix trees and ipv4 addresses

Question

Is there a document that will help me understand how ipv4 addresses are inserted into the patricia/radix trees? I am confused around calculating mask length and if the mask length is for the complete address or one octet in the address.

Any explaination would be appreciated.

Answer 1

I don't know about document (Design and Implementation of 4.4 BSD Unix by Sam Leffler might be a good source, but I don't have it handy) but have a look at this C code: http://cpansearch.perl.org/src/PHILIPP/Net-Patricia-1.15_07/libpatricia/patricia.c

If you're good at C you can probably consider it a document.