IP Addressing Part 1

While we humans are so habitual of using Decimal numbers in our day to day lives, computers and networking devices understand and operate using Binary numbers.

An IP address (IPv4 address to be more precise) is made up of 32 bits, and these 32 bits are divided into four equal parts of 8 bits (or a byte). Hence, an IP address is 4 bytes long.

Each of these bytes is separated by a period(or dot), and that is why we say, “an IP address is represented in dotted decimals”

In this lesson, I have explained the details of binary numbers, significance of each bit position, and how a coefficient of 0 or 1 affects the outcome.

The right most bit is the bit number 0 and then as we move left, they are red as 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6 and 7.
And the position of these bits is how we determine the power of 2.

Example, bit 0 corresponds to 2 to the power of 0, bit 1 corresponds to 2 to the power of 1 and continuing onwards, bit 7 corresponds to 2 to the power of 7.

Explanation in the lesson includes:
a) The significance of the numbers 128, 64, 32, 16, 8, 4, 2, and 1.
b) 0 to 255 being the minimum to maximum decimal numbers range that are possible with 8 bits.
c) Given a decimal number between 0 to 255, how do we determine an equivalent 8-bit binary number.

After completing this tutorial, you will be able to
a) Convert any decimal number between 0 to 255 into its equivalent 8-bit binary number.
b) Convert any 8-bit binary number to its equivalent decimal number.

source

ipv4