Web Caching and Replication

2.5. Summary

The Internet Protocol version 4 is at the core of today's Web. This protocol connects a large number of highly diverse networks into a single network called the Internet and delivers datagrams between individual hosts on this network. To achieve this goal, IP specifies a global address space to address hosts on the Internet, called the IP addresses.

IP uses hierarchical approaches to make its task manageable. To reduce the amount of state routers must maintain, IP divides IP addresses into two parts, which identify a network (network ID bits) and a host on that network (host ID bits). To reduce the complexity of route calculations, IP groups networks into autonomous systems and separates routing into two classes: routing within an ...