DHCP Leases
Of the three address allocation methods supported by DHCP, dynamic address allocation is by far the most popular and important. The significance of the change that dynamic addressing represents to how IP addresses are used in TCP/IP can be seen in the semantics of how addresses are treated in DHCP. Where conventionally a host was said to own an IP address, when dynamic address allocation is used, hosts are said instead to lease an address.
The notion of a lease conveys very accurately the difference between dynamic allocation and the other types. A host no longer is strictly entitled to a particular address, with a server merely telling it what the address is. In DHCP, the server remains the real owner of all the IP addresses in the ...
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