Historical and Future Development of Internet Addresses. Identification, Address Resolution, Routing, Routers, Route tracing and Faultfinding.

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Historical and Future Development of Internet Addresses. Identification, Address Resolution, Routing, Routers, Route tracing and Faultfinding

The Internet can be considered as “a collection of interconnected networks that use the Transmission Control Protocol / Internet Protocol suite” The Internet has its routes in experimental packet switching work which was conducted by the US Department of Defence Advanced Research Project Agency (ARPA). The research and development accomplish by ARPA resulted in the development of ARPANet. This network was responsible for the development of various aspects of the Internet such as file transferring, e-mail and remote terminal access to computers which became incorporated into the TCP / IP protocol. Most of this was done during the 60s and 70s and was later taken on by the Internet Architecture Board (IAB). The IAB is responsible for the development of Internet protocols and IP addressing. The IAB works in conjunction with the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF), which in the past, has been in charge of developing such standards as IP version 4 and IP version 6. As development has occurred many different approaches have been taken to share information such as FTP, HTTP, STMP, IRC etc, which all have their unique way of sharing information but they can all be termed as the Internet as they use the basic underlying fundamentals of IP addressing and routing. I have used IP addressing and the Internet interchangeably.  

An IP (Internet Protocol) address can be defined as “a unique identifier for a node or host connection on an IP network”. A Protocol can be defined as “an agreed-upon  for transmitting  between two ”. Without an agreed format for transmitting data the very concepts of IP addressing could not exist as without a standard communication would be impossible between different protocols. An IP address is a 32 bit binary number usually represented as 4 decimal values, each representing 8 bits, in the range 0 to 255 (known as octets) separated by decimal points. Every IP address consists of two parts, one identifying the network and one identifying the node / host. Currently the Internet Protocol is running on IP version 4 (IPv4), which is a 32 bit addressing structure. An IP address is divided into a network number and a host number. Each number is separated from another number by a dot (decimal point). An example of a typical IP address maybe 182.26.183.123 however the highest IP address allowed in IP version 4 would be 255.255.255.255 as 255 is the maximum value which can be used in an IP address. The InterNIC board is responsible for assigning IP addresses and have broken them down into three main Classes (Class A, B and C). Class A IP addresses are only assigned to large organisations and countries. Such IP address have three bytes available for identifying hosts on one network / subnets. The first bit in Class A address must be zero (Figure 1), the first byte must be range from 1 to 127. Through the use of 7 bits for the network portion and 24 bits for the host portion of the address, 128 networks can exist with around a 16.78 million hosts on each Class A network. A Class B network use two bytes for the network identifier which are used to denote that it is a Class B network. As the two bits of the network portion are used to identify a Class B network, the network portion is reduced to a width of 14 bits and thus only 16384 networks can be assigned which can each have 65536 hosts. Class B addresses are often given to large organisations such as IBM which has tens of thousands of employees. Finally Class C addresses use three octets to identify the network as shown in figure 1. As 21 bits are used in Class C network more then 2 million distinct networks can supported (2^21 = 2097152) and on each network 256 hosts operate in theory. Transmission Control Protocol (TCP), can be defined as “the suite of  used to connect  on the ”. TCP/IP uses several , the two main ones being  and . The difference between an IP and TCP is that  protocol deals only with data , while TCP enables two  to establish a connection and thus can exchange data.         

IP addresses are key to how the Internet functions and without them addressing would be completely impossible under the current IP version 4 standard. IP addresses act as unique identifiers and every device wishing to use the Internet must be assigned one. Figure 2 helps to show what levels of the ISO OSI model IP and TCP protocols operate at. TCP can be thought of as the layer which contains the protocols to carry out various methods of data transfer while the IP address act much like a postal address which the protocols uses to identify where to send the packets and where the packets have come from. If we are to understand addressing, it is important to look at the TCP protocol header. Figure 3 demonstrates how the protocol header is made up. The main parts of the TCP protocol header is the sequence number which is used to identify the data segment being transported. That data field is also very important as it contains the data which is being transmitted to, two or more devices. However the TCP protocol can not work without the IP header which is the reason why both are paired together and called TCP / IP. Figure 4 shows the IP header which contains important information such as the destination address which contains the information of where the data is to be sent to, also the source address indicates where the data has come from which enables two devices to communicate with each other. The TCP protocol operates at the transport layer and the Internet protocol operates at the Internet layer of the ISO OSI model. This is very important as it helps to explain the various jobs each protocol is responsible for. For example at the application level such software runs such as FTP. The actual data which is being sent / received by the ftp will actually be contained in the TCP header while the IP header will only really be concerned with handling address mapping for the transmission of data between two or more hosts. A simple real life example could be that the address on a letter could be considered, as the IP address while the actual letter inside would be the data contained in the TCP header.

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IP addresses can be assigned to be static or dynamic. However it must be remembered that the initial assignment of IP addresses will be carried out by InterNIC. This is too unsure that the same IP is not given to for example two FTP servers. No two computers can use the same IP address. However, one computer (or device) may have several IP addresses. An example of this might be that a computer that serves as a host for multiple services in which case each service may have one or more IP addresses. If the same IP was being ...

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