What does IP address stand for?

What does IP address stand for?

Before we go through the types of IP addresses, let’s look at what does IP address stand for; IP address stands for Inter­net Pro­to­col address. An IP address is an address used to iden­tify any device con­nected to the net­work and the inter­net using TCP/IP, these devices can be com­put­ers, smart­phones, tablets, routers, etc. For instance, the num­ber “69.72.169.241″ is an exam­ple of an IP address. These addresses allow data to reach to the pre­ferred des­ti­na­tion on a net­work and the Internet.

IP address format:

In this arti­cle we will focus on IPv4 since it is widely used, we will talk about IPv6 in a dif­fer­ent arti­cle to avoid con­fu­sion. So an IPv4 address con­sists of 32 bits rep­re­sented by four num­bers sep­a­rated by peri­ods. Each num­ber can be a num­ber between zero and 255. For exam­ple, 1.160.10.240 is an exam­ple of an IPv4 address.

When con­struct­ing a net­work, IP addresses can be assigned ran­domly pro­vided that each IP address is a unique address, this unique­ness is essen­tial to avoid send­ing data to mul­ti­ple des­ti­na­tions or to the wrong destination.

An IP address can be a sta­tic or a dynamic IP address. A sta­tic IP address is a per­ma­nent Inter­net address and will never change. A dynamic IP address changes every time a device con­nects to the inter­net, so a dynamic address is con­sid­ered a tem­po­rary address.

IPv4 Classes:

Types of IPv4 addresses can be cat­e­go­rized into five classes namely: Class A, Class B, Class C, Class D and Class E. Class A, B and C are com­monly used for devices to con­nect to the inter­net. Each class pro­vides a range of IP addresses and the fol­low­ing are the classes:

IPClass	IP Address Range	No. of hosts and net­works each Class provides
Class A	1.0.0.1 to 126.255.255.254	Sup­ports 16.7 mil­lion hosts on each of 126 networks.
Class B	128.1.0.1 to 191.255.255.254	Sup­ports 65,534 hosts on each of 16,382 networks.
Class C	192.0.1.1 to 223.255.254.254	Sup­ports 254 hosts on each of 2 mil­lion networks.
Class D	224.0.0.0 to 239.255.255.255	Reserved for mul­ti­cast groups.
Class E	240.0.0.0 to 254.255.255.254	Reserved for future use, or Research and Devel­op­ment Purposes.