Understanding IPv4 And Its Role In The Internet

Telecom Consultant — Sun, 19 Dec 2010 09:25:36 +0000

IPv4 is a version of IP which is the Internet Protocol. It is the foundation of the modern internet. Curious about what a protocol is and how it runs the internet? That’s what this article is for.

A Protocol describes how separate computers can share information so that they both understand what’s going in. The IP protocol says how pieces of information are transmitted across the network between computers.

The idea is that the computer which is sending the information breaks it up into separate pieces called “packets”. Each one of these pieces gets a header section, which describes where it’s going, and a data section, which holds one small piece of the information.

The next step is to send the packets across the network. Computers that are called routers inspect the headers and decide what to do with them. If they know how to connect to the destination computer, then they will do so and deliver the packet. If they do not know how to connect to the destination computer, they will connect to another router and let that router find the destination. Eventually, a router is found that knows where to find the destination. One fascinating thing to note is that the protocol does not claim that every packet will arrive at all or, if it does arrive, in order or without duplicates.

After the packets get to their destination, the data pieces are put together to get the information that was transmitted. If packets were not received or arrived out of order, there is another protocol called TCP which stands for Transmission Control Protocol that corrects the issues.

TCP does this by tracking the order of the packets and sending acknowledgments to the sender for each packet it receives. If the sender doesn’t get acknowledgement for a packet, then it will be resent. This is why the phrase TCP/IP is often seen. The reason that two protocols are used instead of one is for flexibility. When broadcasting a video to massive amounts of people, it doesn’t really matter if a few packets get lost. It would also be computationally expensive to deal with an acknowledgement for every packet from every persons computer. Having two separate protocols makes it possible to just use one in cases where it’s better to do so.

This kind of flexible design is one of the primary reasons that the internet works so well. Because of it, new functionality can be added with one small new piece that builds on the work of other small pieces. IPv4 is only one both small and critical part of the internet.