ABSTRACT
Even if today it is common to think of the Internet in terms of its human-readable domain names and host names, the latter still leverage the Internet Protocol (IP), the addressing mechanism introduced in the late 1970s by Steve Cocker and Jon Postel. An IP provides the connectionless datagram service that today is at the heart of modern internetworking. It governs how hosts, networks, and subnetworks are identified across the Internet and how packets are routed through them. Remaining agnostic to the intricacies of the underlying communication layers, it represents the first abstraction available to network engineers and software developers. It is thus the ideal starting point to begin the study of any identification mechanism available on the Internet.
