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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 .
A multicast address is a logical identifier for a group of hosts in a computer network that are available to process datagrams or frames intended to be multicast for a designated network service. Multicast addressing can be used in the link layer (layer 2 in the OSI model ), such as Ethernet multicast, and at the internet layer (layer 3 for OSI ...
Its goal was to slow the growth of routing tables on routers across the Internet, and to help slow the rapid exhaustion of IPv4 addresses. [1] [2] IP addresses are described as consisting of two groups of bits in the address: the most significant bits are the network prefix, which identifies a whole network or subnet, and the least significant ...
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 1 048 576: Private network Used for local communications within a private network [3] 192.0.0.0/24 192.0.0.0–192.0.0.255 256 ...
The IP address of the destination is used to make decisions about routing IP packets to other networks. IPv6 is the successor to the first addressing infrastructure of the Internet, Internet Protocol version 4 (IPv4). In contrast to IPv4, which defined an IP address as a 32-bit value, IPv6 addresses have a size of 128 bits.
This is a list of the IP protocol numbers found in the field Protocol of the IPv4 header and the Next Header field of the IPv6 header. It is an identifier for the encapsulated protocol and determines the layout of the data that immediately follows the header.
A subnetwork, or subnet, is a logical subdivision of an IP network. [1]: 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.
The Address Resolution Protocol (ARP) performs this IP-address-to-hardware-address translation for IPv4. In addition, the reverse correlation is often necessary. For example, unless an address is preconfigured by an administrator, when an IP host is booted or connected to a network it needs to determine its IP address.