An Internet Protocol address is a number which provides both a host identifier and a location address.

There are two current IPAddress standards that are in play in the internet environment, IPv4 and IPv6.

• The IPv4 address is a 32-bit number usually denoted as a dot-decimal number that follows the following format: A.B.C.D  where A,B,C and D are numeric values which range from 0-255. This combination allows for 4,294,967,296 (2³²) possible unique addresses.

• The IPv6 address follows eight groups of four hexadecimal digits format, where each group is separated by a colon(:). This format structure allows for 340,282,366,920,938,463,463,374,607,431,768,211,456 or 3.4×10³⁸ or (2¹²⁸) unique addresses.