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Internet Protocol or IP is a connectionless networking protocol standardized in September 1981 by the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) for the United States Department of Defense (DOD) to provide a means of interconnecting groups of computers. IP defines a method of assigning fixed length addresses to networked devices in the form xxx.xxx.xxx.xxx where there are four groups of numbers or octets. Each octet is represented as a decimal number from 0-255. The name octet comes from the binary form of each set where there are 8 positions of 1 or zero for a total of 256 combinations.

IP addresses are grouped into networks of various sizes by assigning ranges. Routing can be simplified by using routers that steer data packets between networks, usually referred to as gateway routers rather than to devices.

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