IP Addressing

IP addressing is a hardware-independent convention which in principle

allows every computer attached to the Internet to be given a
unique logical address (though we will see later on that there are some
important exceptions to this).

IP addresses are currently 32-bit binary strings which are normally seen by
humans (e.g., network administrators, in dotted decimal as in the example:

223.58.1.10

The decimal numbers here have no meaning in isolation; this is simply a

convenient way of encoding the numbers so that administrators and others
find it easier to recognize them. What happens is that the 32-bit address is
broken up into four 8-bit sequences each of which is converted to decimal.
So the above address is in binary:

11011111 00111010 00000001 00001010

IP Address Formats
Originally IP addresses were divided into five classes as shown below.
Classes A, B and C are the most important: the initial bits determine which
class an address belongs to, and the classes differ in how much of the
address is taken up with the network address and how much with the host
address.

Offsets
0 8 16 24
Class A
0 Network Host
Addresses 1.0.0.0 to 127.255.255.255
Class B
10 Network Host
Addresses 128.0.0.0 to 191.255.255.255
Class C
110 Network Host
Addresses 192.0.0.0 to 223.255.255.255
Class D
1110 Multicast address
 Addresses 224.0.0.0 to 239.255.255.255
Class E
11110 Reserved for future use
Addresses 240.0.0.0 to 255.255.255.255

Exclusions

Some address ranges are excluded from the above classes. All addresses
of the form 127.xx.yy.xx are used for diagnostics. The following address
ranges are designated as "private": meaning thay can only be used on
networks which are not connected to the global Internet:

10.0.0.0 - 10.255.255.255
172.16.0.0.0 - 172.31.255.255
192.168.0.0 - 192.168.255.255