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An Internet Protocol address (IP address) is a numerical label such as 192.0.2.1 that is assigned to a device connected to a computer network that uses the Internet Protocol for communication. [1] [2] IP addresses serve two main functions: network interface identification, and location addressing.
In the original design of IPv4, an IP address was divided into two parts: the network identifier was the most significant octet of the address, and the host identifier was the rest of the address. The latter was also called the rest field. This structure permitted a maximum of 256 network identifiers, which was quickly found to be inadequate.
The header contains information about IP version, source IP address, destination IP address, time-to-live, etc. The payload of an IP packet is typically a datagram or segment of the higher-level transport layer protocol, but may be data for an internet layer (e.g., ICMP or ICMPv6) or link layer (e.g., OSPF) instead. Two different versions of IP ...
The original list of IPv4 address blocks was published in September 1981. [3] In previous versions of the document, [18] [19] network numbers were 8-bit numbers rather than the 32-bit numbers used in IPv4. At that time, three networks were added that were not listed earlier: 42.rrr.rrr.rrr, 43.rrr.rrr.rrr, and 44.rrr.rrr.rrr.
It is now called the "DS" (Differentiated Services, "DiffServ") field and the upper 6 bits contain a value called the "DSCP" (Differentiated Services Code Point). The upper 3 bits of DS maintains compatibility with IP Precedence. Since RFC 3168, the remaining two bits (the two least significant bits) are used for Explicit Congestion Notification.
Used for link-local addresses [5] between two hosts on a single link when no IP address is otherwise specified, such as would have normally been retrieved from a DHCP server 172.16.0.0/12 172.16.0.0–172.31.255.255
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During the development of the first version of the Internet Protocol in the 1970s, the initial experimental versions 1 to 3 were not standardized. The first working version that was widely deployed was assigned version number 4. [10] A separate protocol based on reliable connections was developed and assigned version 5.