Today I’m here with another technology which
has revolutionized the way of identifying a website, network, or a computer.
Yes, it’s IP Addressing but do you know how it is assigned? It is definitely a
difficult task!
We all know that Internet is growing at a
very rapid pace which is told by increasing popularity of Tim’s creation -- WWW
(World Wide Web). By 2000 more than 100000 thousand routes of network have been
registered.
Over
the past few years, the Internet has experienced two major scaling issues as it
has struggled to provide continuous and uninterrupted growth:
- ·
The
eventual exhaustion of IP version 4 (IPv4) address space
- ·
The
need to route traffic between the ever increasing number of networks
that comprise the Internet
1.The
first problem is concerned with the eventual depletion of the IP address
space.
IPv4 addresses
IPv4
defines a 32-bit address which means that there are only 232 (4,294,967,296)
IPv4 addresses available.
In
IPv4, an address consists of 32 bits which limits the address space to
4294967296 (232) possible unique addresses. IPv4 reserves some
addresses for special purposes such as private networks (~18 million addresses)
or multicast addresses (~270 million addresses).
IPv4 addresses are canonically represented in
dot-decimal notation, which consists of four decimal numbers, each ranging from
0 to 255, separated by dots, e.g.,100.70.144.23. Each part represents a group
of 8 bits (octet) of the address. In some cases of technical writing, IPv4
addresses may be presented in various hexadecimal, octal, or binary
representations.
2. The
second problem is caused by the rapid growth in the size of the Internet routing tables. Internet backbone
routers are required to maintain complete routing information for the Internet.
Unfortunately,
the routing problem cannot be solved by simply installing more router memory
and increasing the size of the routing tables. The long-term solution to these
problems can be found in the widespread deployment of IP Next Generation (IPng
or IPv6).
IPv6
addresses
IPv6 uses 128 binary bits to create a single
unique address on the network. An IPv6 address is expressed by eight groups of
hexadecimal (base-16) numbers separated by colons, as in
2001:cdba:0000:0000:0000:0000:3257:9652. Groups of numbers that contain all
zeros are often omitted to save space, leaving a colon separator to mark the
gap (as in 2001:cdba::3257:9652).
Currently,
IPv6 is being tested and implemented on the 6Bone network, which is an informal
collaborative project covering North America, Europe, and Japan. 6Bone supports
the routing of IPv6 packets, since that function has not yet been integrated
into many production routers. Until IPv6 can be deployed worldwide, IPv4 patches
will need to be used and modified to continue to provide the universal
connectivity users have come to expect.
As this much information is only
prerequisite for understanding the way of addressing IP I’m not going into
detail. If you ask me, I would be very happy to post a detailed version on IPv4
& IPv6.
If you want to see your IP
address now just type “ipconfig” by opening Command Prompt in Microsoft Windows
like in the screen shot
Now we should get back to work.
IP address assignment
Internet Protocol addresses are assigned to a
host either anew at the time of booting, or permanently by fixed configuration
of its hardware or software. Persistent configuration is also known as using a static
IP address. In contrast, in situations when the computer's IP address is
assigned newly each time, this is known as using a dynamic IP address.
Methods
Static IP addresses are manually assigned to
a computer by an administrator. The exact procedure varies according to
platform. This contrasts with dynamic IP addresses, which are assigned either
by the computer interface or host software itself, as in Zeroconf,
or assigned by a server using Dynamic Host Configuration Protocol (DHCP). Even
though IP addresses assigned using DHCP may stay the same for long periods of
time, they can usually change. In some cases, a network administrator may
implement dynamically assigned static IP addresses. In this case, a DHCP server
is used, but it is specifically configured to always assign the same IP address
to a particular computer. This allows static IP addresses to be configured
centrally, without having to specifically configure each computer on the
network in a manual procedure.
Uses of dynamic address
assignment
IP addresses are most frequently assigned
dynamically on LANs and broadband networks by the Dynamic Host Configuration
Protocol (DHCP). They are used because it avoids the administrative burden of
assigning specific static addresses to each device on a network. It also allows
many devices to share limited address space on a network if only some of them
will be online at a particular time. In most current desktop operating systems,
dynamic IP configuration is enabled by default so that a user does not need to
manually enter any settings to connect to a network with a DHCP server.
Sticky dynamic IP address
A sticky
dynamic IP address is an informal term used by cable and DSL Internet
access subscribers to describe a dynamically assigned IP address which seldom
changes. The addresses are usually assigned with DHCP. Since the modems are
usually powered on for extended periods of time, the address leases are usually
set to long periods and simply renewed. If a modem is turned off and powered up
again before the next expiration of the address lease, it will most likely
receive the same IP address.
Uses of static
addressing
Some infrastructure situations have to use
static addressing, such as when finding the Domain Name System (DNS) host that
will translate domain names to IP addresses. Static addresses are also
convenient, but not absolutely necessary, to locate servers inside an
enterprise. An address obtained from a DNS server comes with a time to live, or
caching time, after which it should be looked up to confirm that it has not
changed. Even static IP addresses do change as a result of network
administration (RFC 2072).
IP addressing
There are four forms of IP addressing, each
with its own unique properties.
- Unicast: The most common concept of an IP address is in unicast
addressing, available in both IPv4 and IPv6. It normally refers to a
single sender or a single receiver, and can be used for both sending and
receiving. Usually, a unicast address is associated with a single device
or host, but it is not a one-to-one correspondence. Some individual PCs
have several distinct unicast addresses, each for its own distinct
purpose. Sending the same data to multiple unicast addresses requires the
sender to send all the data many times over, once for each recipient.
- Broadcast: In IPv4 it is possible to send data to all possible
destinations ("all-hosts broadcast"), which permits the sender
to send the data only once, and all receivers receive a copy of it. In the
IPv4 protocol, the address 255.255.255.255 is used for local
broadcast. In addition, a directed (limited) broadcast can be made by
combining the network prefix with a host suffix composed entirely of
binary 1s. For example, the destination address used for a directed
broadcast to devices on the 192.0.2.0/24 network is 192.0.2.255. IPv6 does not implement
broadcast addressing and replaces it with multicast to the
specially-defined all-nodes multicast address.
- Multicast: A multicast address is associated with a group of
interested receivers. In IPv4, addresses 224.0.0.0 through 239.255.255.255 (the former Class D
addresses) are designated as multicast addresses. IPv6 uses the address
block with the prefix ff00::/8 for multicast applications.
In either case, the sender sends a single datagram from its unicast
address to the multicast group address and the intermediary routers take
care of making copies and sending them to all receivers that have joined
the corresponding multicast group.
- Anycast: Like broadcast and multicast, anycast is a one-to-many
routing topology. However, the data stream is not transmitted to all
receivers, just the one which the router decides is logically closest in
the network. Anycast address is an inherent feature of only IPv6. In IPv4,
anycast addressing implementations typically operate using the
shortest-path metric of BGP routing and do not take into account
congestion or other attributes of the path. Anycast methods are useful for
global load balancing and are commonly used in distributed DNS systems.
And at last telling you something crucial, I
have referred to various websites to such information like Wikipedia, W3C, and
W3Schools etc.
Contact Me (Anubhav Sachan)
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