The Discipline of Organizing: Core Concepts Edition, 3rd Edition

11.13. IP Addressing in the Global Internet

By Andrew McConachie, December 2013.

Overview. Most people take for granted that the Internet just works. They connect their computer to the Internet, it gets an IP address, and they are able to communicate with a computer with a different IP address on the other side of the planet. How did their computer get the correct IP address? How does any computer or router get the correct IP address? How did the routers and other computers on the Internet get their IP addresses? Who decides which computers and which routers get which IP addresses?

What is being organized? At their simplest, an IPv4 address is a 32-bit series of 0′s and 1′s. They are resources that are born-digital, as they have no canonical physical representation. Their digital canonical representation, with which we have all become familiar, is called the “dotted quad” format and is 4 numbers between 0-255 separated with dots. For example, 169.229.216.200 is the IPv4 address for www.berkeley.edu.

Not all IP addresses are of equivalent classes. There are unicast, multicast, broadcast, and experimental IPv4 addresses, and unicast addresses can be either public or private. There are also two different versions of IP addresses currently in use on the Internet, IPv4 and IPv6. We will focus on IPv4 unicast public IP addresses, since these are not only the most common, but also the most important. This is roughly the range of IP addresses from 1.0.0.0 to 223.255.255.255, with some breaks ...