Going Deeper - IP Packets

I wanted to learn about TCP, but ended up studying IPv{4,6} instead, so I’m writing about what I learned. I hope this to be a series of posts where I write about my learnings about lower-level networking concepts.

IP Addresses

Often called “IP"s, these numbers identify a host on the internet. The two internet protocol versions, IPv4 and IPv6, have their own address formats.

• IPv4: IPv4 addresses are 32 bits (4 bytes) long, totaling a bit over four million distinct addresses. An IPv4 address is often written in its dotted-quad form, such as 1.2.3.4 and 255.255.255.255.
• IPv6: IPv6 addresses are 128 bits (16 bytes) long, totalling infinite¹ distinct addresses.

These addresses would be too long to represent in the same way as IPv4 addresses, so they use hex digits, divided into eight groups of 4 characters each: 2001:0db8:1234:4568:90ab:cdef:dead:beef.

Even then, these addresses are too long to fully list every time, so leading zeroes and groups of zeroes are omitted, so 2001:0db8:0000:0000:0000:0000:0000:0001 becomes 2001:db8::1.

IP Packet Headers

The link layer is magic, and can transport data frames across devices connected directly to each other. Here, the internet layer introduces the concept of packets that consist of a packet header and the payload.

The IP packet header² contains the following fields, among others:

• IP version (4 or 6)
• Source address
• Destination address
• Protocol number

The last field, the protocol number, identifies which protocol data is contained in the IP packet, such as TCP, UDP, and ICMP.

The IP header contains all the information required to route the packet from the source to its destination without having to inspect the packet payload³, and only the receiving host will have to inspect it.

IP Fragmentation

The link layer is not actually magic, and has some limitations. One such limitation is the maximum size of the IP packets send over those links.

The upper limit on the packet size is called the message transmission unit, or MTU for short. When a host needs to transmit a packet that is larger than allowed by the MTU, the packet needs to be fragmented.

Packet fragmentation works by chopping up the packet payload such that each chunk will fit in an MTU-sized packet, and sending each packet separately, noting the fact that the packet was fragmented in the packet header. In theory, this allows intermediate routers to simply pass fragmented packets along, and only the destination host needs to reassemble the packet (a relatively expensive operation)⁴.

However, due to various reasons, IP packet fragmentation is fragile, broken, and overall terrible. The general recommendation is to avoid relying on fragmentation and reassembly to work properly.