Networking Bible

Chapter 18. The Internet Protocols

IN THIS CHAPTER

• How the Internet Protocol is used to send packets

• How addresses are created and assigned

• Different network sizes and how to create subnets

• Create and use networks that have IPv6

The Internet Protocol, or IP, is the primary protocol used to provide an end-to-end delivery of packets over a TCP/IP network. Two versions of IP exist: IPv4, which is in widespread use, and IPv6, which is being phased in. Both are described in detail in this chapter.

IP is a transport-independent protocol that works over a wide variety of networks. It was designed to be connectionless, fault tolerant, and routable. There are four different types of IPv4 routing: unicast, broadcast, directed broadcast, and multicast. IPv6 expands multicast, eliminates broadcast, and adds an anycast routing function.

The address spaces of IPv4 and IPv6 are very different. IPv4 is a 32-bit address space where addresses are usually written in a dot decimal format, ###.###.###.###. The address space can be divided into different-sized blocks by a masking technique, blocks can be subnetted, and other techniques such as NAT are used to extend the address space. Address assignment by DHCP is described in this chapter.

IPv6 is a 128-bit address space and has addresses that are usually written in a hexadecimal format, with eight blocks in the format, nnnn:nnnn:nnnn:nnnn:hhhh:hhhh:hhhh:hhhh, where n is the network ID and h is the host ID. There are different ways to express IPv6 addresses. ...