Lecture 11: The IP Protocol #1

IP Addressing

The concept of a global Internet addressing scheme is fundamental to IP. Every Internet-connected system has a unique Internet host address. This is a 32 bit, or 4 byte, binary number.

Internet addresses are always written as a dotted sequence of the form:

aa.bb.cc.dd

where aa, bb, etc, are the decimal values (ranging from 0 to 255) of the 4 bytes which make up the internet address, for example:

149.144.21.60

This is called the "Common Internet Address Notation". Internet addresses are commonly referred to as "IP addresses".

The dotted sequence 149.144.21.60 is the IP address of "ironbark", or to use its full domain name, ironbark.bendigo.latrobe.edu.au.. Note that the traditional Internet literature refers to internet-connected computers as hosts, which reflects the historical nature of computers as multi-user timeshared systems.

Lecture 11: The IP Protocol #1

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