Classful Network Addressing

What is a Network Address?

A Network Address is a logical or physical address that uniquely identifies a host or a machine in a telecommunication network. A network may also not be unique and can contain some structural and hierarchical information of the node in the network. Internet protocol (IP) addresses, Media Access Control (MAC) addresses, and telephone numbers are some basic examples of network addresses. It can be of numeric type symbolic or both in some cases....

Network Addressing

It is the prime responsibility of the network layer to assign unique addresses to different nodes in a network. As mentioned earlier they can be physical or logical but primarily they are logical addresses i.e. software-based addresses.  The most widely used network address is an IP address. It uniquely identifies a node in an IP network. An IP address is a 32-bit long numeric address represented in a form of dot-decimal notation where each byte is written in a decimal form separated by a period. For example 196.32.216.9 is an IP address where 196 represents first 8 bits, 32 next 8 bits and so on. The first three bytes of an IP address represents the network and the last byte specifies the host in the network. An IP address is further divided into sub classes:...

Classful Network Addressing

Class Leading Bits NET ID Bits HOST ID Bits Number of Networks Addresses per Network Range A 0 8 24 27 224 0.0.0.0 to 127.255.255.255 B 10 16 16 214 216 128.0.0.0 to 191.255.255.255 C 110 24 8 221 28 192.0.0.0 to 223.255.255.255 D 1110 Not defined Not defined  Not defined Not defined 224.0.0.0 to 239.255.255.255 E 1111 Not defined Not defined  Not defined Not defined 240.0.0.0 to 255.255.255.255...

Frequently Asked Question on Network Addressing – FAQs

What is the difference between IP address and MAC address?...