Forwarding and Addressing in the Internet

Forwarding and Addressing in the Internet

In this section we’ll learn about forwarding and addressing in the internet .

We’ll see that forwarding and addressing in the internet are important components of the Internet Protocol (IP). There are two versions of IP in use today. We’ll first examine the widely deployed IP version 4, which is usually referred to simply as IPv4 [RFC 791].

We’ll also examine IP version 6 [RFC 2460; RFC 4291], which has been proposed to replace IPv4.

But before beginning our foray into IP, let’s take a step back and consider the components that make up the internet’s network layer. As shown in the figure below, the internet’s network layer has three major components.

1. The first component is the IP
2. The second major component is the routing component, which determines the path a datagram follows from source to destination
3. The final component of the network layer is a facility to report errors in datagrams and respond to requests for certain network-layer information.