How an IP Address is assigned to a Network?

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.

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