Internet Protocol (IP)
Internet protocol is widely respected and deployed Network Layer protocol which helps to communicate end to end devices over the internet. It comes in two flavors. IPv4 which has ruled the world for decades but now is running out of address space. IPv6 is created to replace IPv4 and hopefully mitigates limitations of IPv4 too.
Internet Protocol is connectionless and unreliable protocol. It ensures no guarantee of successfully transmission of data.
In order to make it reliable, it must be paired with reliable protocol such as TCP at the transport layer.
Internet protocol transmits the data in form of a datagram as shown in the following diagram:
Points to remember:
The length of datagram is variable.
The Datagram is divided into two parts: header and data.
The length of header is 20 to 60 bytes.
The header contains information for routing and delivery of the packet.
