Dedicated IP Space

An Internet Protocol address (IP address) is a numerical label that can be assigned to a device (e.g., an Internet telephone, computer, printer). This IP address serves two principal functions: host or network interface identification and location addressing. Its role has been characterized as: “A name indicates what we seek. An address indicates where it is. A route or path indicates how to get there.

Internet Protocol (IP) is the method or protocol by which data (or a message) is sent from one dervice to another over the Internet. Each device is known as a host on the Internet has at least one IP address that uniquely identifies it from all other devices using on the Internet.

Because a digital message is divided into a number of “data packets”, each packet can, if necessary, be sent by a different route across the Internet. Packets can arrive in a different order than the order they were sent in. The Internet Protocol just delivers them. It’s up to another protocol, the Transmission Control Protocol (TCP) to put them back in the right order.

IP is a connectionless protocol, which means that there is no continuing connection between the end points that are communicating. Each packet that travels through the Internet is treated as an independent unit of data without any relation to any other unit of data. (The reason the packets do get put in the right order is because of TCP, the connection-oriented protocol that keeps track of the packet sequence in a message.) The most widely used version of IP today is Internet Protocol Version 4 (IPv4).

IPv4 defines IP addresses in a 32-bit format, which looks like a set of 12 numbers divided into 4 sections and each section having 3 numbers. An example if this is: 123.123.123.123. Each three-digit section can include any number from 0 to 255, which means the total number of IPv4 addresses available is 4,294,967,296