2. Internet Protocol Address (IP Address)
• An Internet Protocol address (IP address) is a logical numeric address
that is assigned to every single computer or any other device that is
part of a TCP/IP-based network.
The numerals in an IP address are divided into 2 parts:
• The network part specifies which networks this address belongs to .
• The host part further pinpoints the exact location.
3. Types of IP addresses
• The IP addresses can be classified into two.
IP Version 4 and IP Version 6
The two versions of IP addresses currently running are IP versions 4
(IPv4) and IP versions 6 (IPv6). There are many features with these two
versions.
4. IP Version 4
• IPv4 uses 32-bit IP address. So the maximum number of IP address is
232—or 4,294,967,296.
• This is a little more than four billion IP addresses. An IPv4 address is
typically formatted as four 8-bit fields. Each 8-bit field represents a
byte of the IPv4 address. As we have seen earlier, each fields will be
separated with dots. This method of representing the byte of an IPv4
address is referred to as the dotted-decimal format. The bytes of the
IPv4 is further classified into two parts. The network part and the host
part.
5.
6.
7.
8. IP address and classes
• The IP hierarchy contains many classes of the IP addresses. Broadly,
the IPv4 addressing system is divided into five classes of IP address.
All the five classes are identified by the first octet of the IP address.
1) Class A address
2) Class B address
3) Class C address
4) Class D address
5) Class E address
9.
10.
11. IPv6 (Internet Protocol Version 6)
• An IPv6 address is made of 128 bits divided into eight 16-bits blocks. Each
block is then converted into 4-digit Hexadecimal numbers separated by colon
symbols.
• For example, given below is a 128 bit IPv6 address represented in binary
format and divided into eight 16-bits blocks:
0010000000000001 0000000000000000 0011001000111000
1101111111100001 0000000001100011 0000000000000000
0000000000000000 1111111011111011
• Each block is then converted into Hexadecimal and separated by ‘:’ symbol:
2001:0000:3238:DFE1:0063:0000:0000:FEFB
12. Hexadecimal Number System
• Before IPv6 Address format,
look into Hexadecimal Number
System. Hexadecimal is a
positional number system that
uses radix (base) of 16. To
represent the values in readable
format, this system uses 0-9
symbols to represent values
from zero to nine and A-F to
represent values from ten to
fifteen. Every digit in
Hexadecimal can represent
values from 0 to 15.
13. IPv6
• The most obvious improvement in IPv6 over IPv4 is that IP addresses
are lengthened from 32 bits to 128 bits.
• IPv6 addresses are 128 bits long (16 bytes), including 64 bits for the
network number and 64 bits for the host number.
• This new IP address version is being deployed to fulfill the need for
more Internet addresses. It was aimed to resolve issues which are
associated with IPv4. With 128-bit address space, it allows 340
undecillion unique address space. IPv6 also called IPng (Internet
Protocol next generation).
14. • IPv6 utilizes 128-bit Internet addresses. Therefore, it can support
2^128 Internet addresses —
340,282,366,920,938,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 of them to
be exact. That's a lot of addresses, so many that it requires a
hexadecimal system to display the addresses. In other words, there
are more than enough IPv6 addresses to keep the Internet
operational for a very, very long time.
