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Packets that hold Internet Protocol data carry a 4-bit IP version number as the first field of its header. [ 1 ] [ 2 ] Currently, only IPv4 and IPv6 packets are seen on the Internet , having IP version numbers 4 and 6, respectively.
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.
IPv4 address exhaustion timeline. IPv4 address exhaustion is the depletion of the pool of unallocated IPv4 addresses.Because the original Internet architecture had fewer than 4.3 billion addresses available, depletion has been anticipated since the late 1980s when the Internet started experiencing dramatic growth.
An IP address is part of a CIDR block and is said to match the CIDR prefix if the initial n bits of the address and the CIDR prefix are the same. An IPv4 address is 32 bits so an n -bit CIDR prefix leaves 32 − n bits unmatched, meaning that 2 32− n IPv4 addresses match a given n -bit CIDR prefix.
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.
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Internet Protocol version 4 (IPv4) defines an IP address as a 32-bit number. [77] IPv4 is the initial version used on the first generation of the Internet and is still in dominant use. It was designed in 1981 to address up to ≈4.3 billion (10 9) hosts.