Internet Protocol (IP)#
If you remember back to when we were talking about TCP and UDP, we spoke about how an application creates some data which is "wrapped" in a TCP packet or a UDP datagram and then sent over the network to another system. What we never covered was how we addressed the data. How did we know where to send things?
That's where IP comes into the picture, and as you already know, we have two types of addresses available: IPv4 and IPv6.
Because we've already covered these two address types in detail, we'll only cover how an IP address is used as part of the IP protocol.