Hi friends, welcome back to “Tech&Soft”. This article begins with module 2, where we are going to understand the networking basics and get ourselves comfortable with TCP/IP terminologies. For time being, in this article we will be discussing about the Internet Protocol (IP) addressing. We’ll explore the classification of IP addresses and further have a look at basic concepts used in this protocol addressing. A quick grasp on the topic is required to go hand-in-hand with the pace of this series. At the end of this article you’ll be able to classify IP addresses based on different classes and will also be able to identify and understand the significance of the network and the host part in an IP address.
For those who don’t know what a protocol is let me tell you, a protocol is basically a set of rules that are followed by computers to communicate to provide a standardization. When two or more systems are on an inter network (internet), there is a need for standardization to start communication. It is similar to scenario, two people talking to each other, this is only possible when both can understand and speak the same language. Therefore that is the need and significance of standardizing the entire computer communication. Well, if you are still unable to understand what I’m talking about then you must not be here!
So what is an IP address?
An IP address is a unique address to the any device on a network. It is something similar to the real world scenario where we all have phone numbers to be associated with, if someone want to contact you then they dial the number you are associated with and gets you on-line. Similarly the computers on network are associated with something called an IP address and it is used for the communication between the systems. Basically, the IP addresses are allocated dynamically, which means every time you connect to the internet you get a new IP address which means that the IP address is changes.
A typical IPv4 address is a 32-bit address, divided into 4 octets and looks similar to the following: 192.168.56.100
Now you might be wondering what is IPv4? So let me tell you, when the internet was built, it was not expected to connect more than 4 billion devices but as the time went on there was a drastic change and everyone wanted to connect to the internet and that made a deficit of IP addresses. Therefore, a new version of IP address was launched and was called to be version 6 or IPv6. And henceforth the old one was considered to be version 4 or in other words IPv4.
If you want to know the IP address of your computer then open up your Command prompt or Terminal. And type ‘ipconfig’ if you are using Windows Operating System else type ‘ifconfig’ if you are using UNIX machine.
Here is the snapshot of the output when you type the command ‘ipconfig’ on Windows machine.
What can we understand by looking at an IP address?
The IP address consists of two parts. One is the network part and the other is the host part. The network part of the IP address identifies the network on which the host is. And the host part identifies the device on the network. Therefore, in other words, devices on the same network (for example, devices under the same Wi-Fi connection) will have the same network part and only the host part will be changed.
Generally the IP addresses are classified into a set of classes based on how many bits are to be seen on the network part and the host part. These classes are as follows:
Class A: Here is the range of 1st octet in an IP address lies through 1 to 126, since the first bit is reserved to define the class. That means, the IP addresses starting with 1.xxx.xxx.xxx to 126.xxx.xxx.xxx belongs to the ‘Class A’. This in turn means that the first 8-bits of type ‘Class A’ IP address identifies the network and the remaining is for the host part (Only 7-bits actually, the first bit is always 0, because that defines that it is a ‘Class A’ type of IP address). Therefore, we can clearly imagine how many networks and hosts could be possible in a ‘Class A’ type of IP. In a ‘Class A’ type of IP there can be 128 networks (2 to the power of 7) in the world that can have ‘Class A’ address and the remaining 24-bits are for hosts (2 to the power of 24 hosts are possible).
Class B: In ‘Class B’, the first 16-bits (the 1st 2 octets)are considered to identify the network part, but since in this case, the first 2-bits are reserved for identifying the type of network, i.e. the first 2-bits are always 1 followed by 0 we have only 14-bits for the network part. Therefore, there could be 16,384 (2 to the power of 14), networks possible in the ‘Class B’ network and the remaining (2 to the power of 16) is for the host part. The range lies from 128.0.xxx.xxx through 191.255.xxx.xxx.
Class C: All addresses that start with binary bits 110 belong to ‘Class C’. Since 3-bits are reserved for the identification of ‘Class C’ address the other 21 bits are available for the network part. Therefore, 2,097,152 (2 to the power of 21) networks are possible and the remaining (2 to the power of 8 bits) are for the host part. Here, the first 3 octets identify the network, therefore, the range lies from 192.0.0.xxx through 223.255.255.xxx.
The ‘Class D’ is reserved for multicast addressing, that means, anyone allocated to Class D IP address can communicate with many at a time where as the ‘Class E’ is reserved for the future use.
So the next time you see an IP that falls in the range of any of the above you can identify to what class it belongs to.
So that’s all for this tutorial! In the net article we will look at subnetting and IPv4 vs. IPv6 in detail.
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