Hi Everyone,
Today, I will discuss about a brief history of the Internet Protocol IP today. So, before we go through the Internet Protocol, we must first comprehend the fundamentals of the protocol. When two or more devices want to communicate with each other on the same network, they need a unique ID. Internet Protocol (IP) addresses are the unique numbers assigned to every computer or device that is connected to the Internet As shown in the figure 1. There are multiple IP devices are connected with central router and the uplink of the router is further connected to the Internet. And each device has allocated a unique IP address.
Figure 1. IP device allocated a unique IP address
Also to identify that every device connected to the Internet, whether it is a web server, mail server, DNS, PDAs, IP Phones, household appliances, Health care, monitoring traffic management system and many more needs IP addresses illustrated in figure 2.
Figure 2. Identify IP devices
IPv4, was globally deployed, and introduced by ARPANET in 1980 and standardized in mid-1981s. After several years of rapid expansion and exponential growth of the Internet, the available IPv4 addresses have been fully allocated to Internet Services Providers (ISPs) and users which is 32-bits long. That’s why we need IPv6, the next generation of the Internet Protocol that has a massively bigger address space than IPv4.
At the time of standardization of IPv4, the world population was around 4.41 billion in 1980.
The ratio of IPv4 address to the world population was 1:1. shown in figure 3.
Figure 3. comparison between IPv4 and World Population
IPv4-1981
4.29 billion addresses, about a 1:1 ratio with the world’s population. What was the Internet like in 1981?
No WWW, no mobile devices, and most people never heard of the Internet As the major devices were mostly mainframe and minicomputers.
The Internet Become Most Popular
1989s introduced the World Wide Web(WWW). Everyone was getting on the Internet.
Internet routing tables grew rapidly – 20,000 routes in 1994. Due to the rapid growth rate, Internet Engineering Task Force(IETF) realized that it would soon run out of IPv4 address space. As shown in figure 4.
Figure 4. Internet popular and Internet routing tables growth
IPv4: Running Out of IPv4 Addresses
In order to slow down the running out of IPv4 address space, Internet Engineering Task Force(IETF) introduced two solutions such as, short-term solutions as well as Long-term solution.
The short term solutions included.
Network Address Translation (NAT) & Port Address Translation (PAT)
Private address space
Classless Inter-Domain Routing (CIDR)
The long-term solution.
IPv6
References
https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/html/rfc791
https://blog.apnic.net/2020/01/14/bgp-in-2019-the-bgp-table/
https://www.iana.org/numbers
www.census.gov
