IP Addressing
Todd Lammle · 2018
This chapter discusses how IP addressing was designed to allow hosts on one network to communicate with a host on a different network regardless of the type of LANs the hosts are participating in. The disadvantage of the flat-addressing scheme, and the reason it is not used for IP addressing, relates to routing. All routers on the Internet would need to store the address of each and every machine on the Internet. The designers of the Internet decided to create classes of networks based on network size. They created the rank Class A network for the small number of networks possessing a very large number of hosts. The people who created the IP addressing scheme also created what we call private IP addresses. These addresses can be used on a private network, but they are not routable through the Internet.