All about IP address

Each machine using the network has its own identifier. Similar as you send out the letter to an address through the mail, computers utilize this identifier for sending info to a specific computer on the network. Many networks currently use IP protocol as a standard for communication. This unique IP address or protocol can be of great importance in this respect.

What is an IP address?

The IP address identifies the device uniquely on the network.

You may have noticed these addresses; they seem something like 199.177.1.24. IP addresses are always in a set of 4 numbers. Every number ranges between 0 – 255. Thus, a full IP address ranges between 0.0.0.0 - 255.255.255.255.

The reason behind this range is that every number is the 8-figured binary number (known as an octet). For an octet, zero means 00000000 and 255 means 11111111. Thus, every IP address has a binary form.

How Can a Device Acquire Its IP Address?

The dynamic IP can be assigned automatically to every device which connects with a network. A wide variety of the networks currently use DHCP (Dynamic Host Configuration Protocol) for making this happen. As a device makes a connection with a network, it can send out broadcasts and requests for an IP. The dynamic protocol intercepts the message and assigns an IP address to a device, out of a pool of the available addresses.

What are the main parts of the IP address?

An IP address consists of 2 parts:

Network ID: This part of an IP address begins from the left which identifies a specific network onto which device connects. In typical networks used at homes, device owns an IP address like 199.177.1.24, in which 199.177.1 is the network ID of address. The missing part is usually filled with zero. Thus you may say that the device has a network ID of 199.177.1.0.

Host ID: This part of an IP address isn’t taken up by network ID. A host ID can identify some specific device (within the world of IP, these devices are called hosts) on the network. Taking the previous example again, for an IP of 199.177.1.24, the host ID is 24 – the unique ID of the host on the network.

On the home networks, you may see a few devices having IP addresses such as 199.177.1.2, 199.177.1.3, 199.177.1.40, and 199.177.1.44. Each of them shows unique devices on the same network having host IDs of 2, 3, 40 and 44 and network IDs of 199.177.1.0.

Which information does the IP address reveal?

Picturing it a bit better, here is an analogy. This mechanism is pretty similar to the street addresses that work in the city. Like, consider the address such as 2019 paradise street. Here the name of the street shows a network ID while house number shows a host ID. In a city, none of the two streets can have the same names as like none of the two network IDs can be same on the same network. Similarly, for a particular street, the house number is unique, only like each host ID of the same network is always unique. So, an IP address shows the unique address of a particular device on a network and none of the other devices can acquire the same IP.