HISTORY AND FEATURES
History:
- First Invented in 1960s and 1970s for the Department of Defense
- Adopted as Military Standard in 1983
- First version was IPv2.0, which allowed for 255 hosts on the network
- Current version is IPv4.0 which allows for 4,294,967,296 hosts
- Next version is IPv6.0 which allows for several hundred billion hosts
Features:
- Open protocol standards. And architecture independance
- Media independance
- Common addressing scheme
- Standardized high level protocols. All of the protocols can be found in IETF RFCs
Drawbacks:
- Not designed for security, so protocols are inherently insecure. Security features have had to be added in over
the existance of IPv4.