97network ConCePts and design
3.3 IP Addressing
It is well known that each computer on the Internet must have an IP address. A router
must have two or more IP addresses to connect two or more networks. For the com-
puters in a network to be able to communicate with each other, we need to resolve
some issues such as how to assign an IP address to a computer, how to distribute a set
of IP addresses to a group of computers, how to congure the computers in a LAN
segment so that they can exchange information within the segment, how to determine
the size of a LAN segment, and so on. In this section, we will rst take a closer look at
the issues related to the IP address assignment to meet the requirements of a network
infrastructure.
3.3.1 Netwo