![](https://csdnimg.cn/release/download_crawler_static/2267023/bg12.jpg)
Registration services for the Internet (IP addresses and DNS domain names) used to be handled by the NIC, at
nic.ddn.mil
. On April 1, 1993, the InterNIC was created. Now the NIC handles these requests only for the Defense
Data Network (DDN). All other Internet users now use the InterNIC registration services, at
rs.internic.net
.
There are actually three parts to the InterNIC: registration services (
rs.internic.net
), directory and database
services (
ds.internic.net
), and information services (
is.internic.net
). See Exercise 1.8 for additional
information on the InterNIC.
There are three types of IP addresses: unicast (destined for a single host), broadcast (destined for all
hosts on a given network), and multicast (destined for a set of hosts that belong to a multicast group).
Chapters 12 and 13 look at broadcasting and multicasting in more detail.
In Section 3.4 we'll extend our description of IP addresses to include subnetting, after describing IP
routing. Figure 3.9 shows the special case IP addresses: host IDs and network IDs of all zero bits or all
one bits.
1.5 The Domain Name System
Although the network interfaces on a host, and therefore the host itself, are known by IP addresses,
humans work best using the name of a host. In the TCP/IP world the Domain Name System (DNS) is a
distributed database that provides the mapping between IP addresses and hostnames. Chapter 14 looks
into the DNS in detail.
For now we must be aware that any application can call a standard library function to look up the IP
address (or addresses) corresponding to a given hostname. Similarly a function is provided to do the
reverse lookup-given an IP address, look up the corresponding hostname.
Most applications that take a hostname as an argument also take an IP address. When we use the Telnet
client in Chapter 4, for example, one time we specify a host-name and another time we specify an IP
address.
1.6 Encapsulation
When an application sends data using TCP, the data is sent down the protocol stack, through each layer,
until it is sent as a stream of bits across the network. Each layer adds information to the data by
prepending headers (and sometimes adding trailer information) to the data that it receives. Figure 1.7
shows this process. The unit of data that TCP sends to IP is called a TCP segment. The unit of data that
IP sends to the network interface is called an IP datagram. The stream of bits that flows across the
Ethernet is called a frame.
The numbers at the bottom of the headers and trailer of the Ethernet frame in Figure 1.7 are the typical
sizes of the headers in bytes. We'll have more to say about each of these headers in later sections.
A physical property of an Ethernet frame is that the size of its data must be between 46 and 1500 bytes.
We'll encounter this minimum in Section 4.5 and we cover the maximum in Section 2.8.
All the Internet standards and most books on TCP/IP use the term octet instead of byte. The use of this cute, but
baroque term is historical, since much of the early work on TCP/IP was done on systems such as the DEC-10, which
did not use 8-bit bytes. Since almost every current computer system uses 8-bit bytes, we'll use the term byte in this
text.
To be completely accurate in Figure 1.7 we should say that the unit of data passed between IP and the network
interface is a packet. This packet can be either an IP datagram or a fragment of an IP datagram. We discuss
fragmentation in detail in Section 11.5.
We could draw a nearly identical picture for UDP data. The only changes are that the unit of information
that UDP passes to IP is called a UDP datagram, and the size of the UDP header is 8 bytes.
Page 18
ABC Amber CHM Converter Trial version, http://www.processtext.com/abcchm.html