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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.
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 ...
There are two primary types of IP addresses in use today: IP version 4 (IPv4) and IP version 6 (IPv6). The former has been around since January 1983 , and is still the most common.
IPv6 addresses are assigned to organizations in much larger blocks as compared to IPv4 address assignments—the recommended allocation is a / 48 block which contains 2 80 addresses, being 2 48 or about 2.8 × 10 14 times larger than the entire IPv4 address space of 2 32 addresses and about 7.2 × 10 16 times larger than the / 8 blocks of IPv4 ...
The payload is the data that is transported. This method of nesting the data payload in a packet with a header is called encapsulation. IP addressing entails the assignment of IP addresses and associated parameters to host interfaces. The address space is divided into subnets, involving the designation of
Addresses in this group consist of an 80-bit prefix of zeros, the next 16 bits are ones, and the remaining, least-significant 32 bits contain the IPv4 address. For example, ::ffff:192.0.2.128 represents the IPv4 address 192.0.2.128. A previous format, called "IPv4-compatible IPv6 address", was ::192.0.2.128; however, this method is deprecated. [36]
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