Chapter 10. Delivering the Goods to the Right Street
(IP) Address
What You Will Learn
After reading this chapter, you should be able to
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Explain the basic process of routing an IP packet from one
computer to another
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Describe the structure of IP addresses
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Describe the size of Class A, B, and C IP networks
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Identify addresses as belonging to a particular Class A, B, or
C network
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Describe the need for IP subnetting
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Explain how a basic example of IP subnetting works when you're
using a Class B network
When people use computers, they like to use names to refer to
other computersespecially names that are easy to remember. For instance, it's a
lot easier to remember something like http://www.cisco.com, instead of a
number like 198.133.219.25. As it turns out, you could plug either the name or
the number into your browser's URL field to get Cisco's home page, but the name
is much easier to remember.
Computers, however, find it more convenient to identify each
computer using a number. Computers, working together with networking devices
called routers, deliver data from one
computer to another. So, although a human might prefer to use names like http://www.cisco.com, computers and routers prefer to forward
data to http://www.cisco.com using the server's numeric address, such
as 198.133.219.25.
In the previous two chapters, you focused on application
protocols and how they use TCP for some common functions. However, to focus on
those protocols, those chapters avoided several issues. For instance, when a
user types http://www.cisco.com, how does she know where the web server
is? How does the PC know where to send the data? Assuming Cisco's web server is
on a different LANwhich is likelyhow do other networking devices, such as
routers, know how to deliver the bits to the web server?
The next four chapters finally get around to answering those
questions. In this chapter, you learn some important details about the Internet
Protocol (IP), including how IP addresses work.
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