Answering one of the most Google’d questions: ‘What is my IP address?’
There’s no place like 127.0.0.1
An online content delivery system
Akin to postal addresses, IP addresses are assigned to each recipient in a worldwide infrastructure. The recipient could be a single device such as a laptop, phone, tablet, or even your air-conditioner controller — but could also be a network entry point to a large organization.
Since its inception, IP was designed with simplicity and efficiency in mind. That’s why it has remained effective at handling internet traffic, starting on a network with four nodes in the late 1960s, to billions of devices today.
An IP address is a number in binary format, which means it has 32 digits (or bits) comprising 1s and 0s. The address is typically grouped as four 8-bit numbers, so each number is eight digits that are either a 1 or 0.
But we usually view IP addresses in a decimal format, wherein the value between 00000000-11111111 becomes a number between 0 and 255. So the complete IP address space ranges from 0.0.0.0 through to 255.255.255.255.
See an example below, using the IP address of one of the servers that hosts theconversation.com.
IP addresses are centrally managed by theInternet Assigned Numbers Authority, which delegates to one of five regional registries: Africa, America, Asia-Pacific, Latin America, and Europe-West/Central Asia.
Not all addresses are available for use by anyone. Many arereservedfor specific purposes. For example, three ranges of addresses (10.0.0.0—10.255.255.255, 192.168.0.0—192.168.255.255, and 172.16.0.0—172.31.255.255) are reserved for private networks such as your home.
Other large blocks of addresses areassigned to specific organizations. The US Department of Defense “owns” the “6” prefix (6.x.y.z), as well as 11 others.
IPv6: a new frontier
IPv4 (version 4) is the most widely used version of IP in the world right now. Datingback to the 1980s, it has a capacity of more than four billion unique addresses — which was considered enough back then.
But a combination of wasteful use (such as organizations being allocated larger IP address spaces than they need), and the exponential increase of users, is causing this space to run out.
For now, IPv4 is still here. But its demise has long beenpredictedand it will eventually no longer be fit for purpose. There are technical solutions, however.
The most useful ones are Network Address Translation (more on this later) and a newer version of IP: version 6. Although IPv6 is newer than IPv4, it isn’t really “new”. It was originally proposed some25 years ago.
The shift to IPv6 brings a range of benefits, even if they are basically transparent as far as consumers are concerned. The most significant change with IPv6 is the increase in the size of IP addresses from 32 bits to 128 bits.
Version 6 also boosts the total number of unique IP addresses on offer, up to some 340,282,366,920,938,463,463,374,607,431,768,211,456. Even with the rapid rise in device usage, this address pool shouldlast us a long time.
Making efficient use of addresses
As mentioned above, private addresses can be used for individual devices inside an organization (or home). But private addresses can’t be used on the internet, so these devices “hide” behind one public/external IP address.
This public address is capable of supporting up to hundreds of thousands of devices for a large organization. But a router is needed to connect the network to the internet. The router translates the many internal private addresses which are hiding behind the public IP address (or several of them).
The process of routing many devices through a single IP address is called “nesting” networks. And the technique it uses is referred to as Network Address Translation (NAT). When data is delivered to a private organization or home network, the router forwards the traffic to a specific internal computer using that computer’s private IP address.
IP and download speeds
You probably won’t be using IP addresses in your daily life. But in order to access a website, our computers need to “lookup” the IP address for that site. This all happens in the background.
Once our computer has retrieved the website’s IP address, our browser will connect to the address, request the website data from the server, and load the page.
In the image above, you’ll notice four different addresses. This allows the servers delivering the content to distribute the workload between four servers. Some websites go further and use Content Delivery Networks (CDNs).
CDNs host copies of web content in servers around the globe. This means the content requested can be delivered from a location that is geographically closer to the user trying to access it. This reduces the time it takes to load the page.
The future of IP
IPv6 may be slowly rolling out in ISP networks and large organizations, but home users and smaller companies will still be using IPv4 for the foreseeable future.
The increased number of devices connected to the internet will certainly test our home routers – with predictions of25 billiondevices expected globally within the next decade. Fortunately, even with this predicted explosion, IPv4 at home will be able to cope.
In the meantime, if you want to know your public IP address, simply search “what is my IP address” and Google (as well as several other search engines) will deliver your public IP address. If you want to check your private IP address, this will take alittle more effort.
Article byPaul Haskell-Dowland, Associate Dean (Computing and Security),Edith Cowan UniversityandBogdan Ghita, Associate dean (International), Faculty of Science and Engineering,University of Plymouth
This article is republished fromThe Conversationunder a Creative Commons license. Read theoriginal article.
Story byThe Conversation
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