Full Form of IP :
Internet Protocol
IP Full Form is Internet Protocol Address. IP refers to the label with numeric, assigned to every device that uses Internet Protocol to communicate over the computer network. There are two reasons for IP address – It serves as identification to the network or host interface and as a local address. IP addresses are easily readable and are a 32-bit number. A static IP address is manually assigned by an administrator to a computer. On the other hand, a dynamic IP address is assigned by host software or a computer interface. There are two versions in IP address, which are practically in use and they are IP version 4 and version 6. Each of these versions defines IP addresses in a different manner.
IP is the main communications protocol that is used in the Internet Protocol suite for the purposes of relaying datagrams across various network boundaries. The routing functions of IP allow internetworking and establishes an internet connection. The task of the IP is to deliver packets from the hosting source to the destination host on the basis of the IP addresses in packet headers. For this, there are defined packet structures undertaking encapsulation of the data that is to be delivered. IP also defines various addressing methods to be used for labeling the datagram with the destination and source information.
The nature of IP has been, historically, that of the connectionless datagram service provided in the first Transmission Control program which was introduced by Bob Kahn and Vint Cerf in the year 1974; the Transmission Control Protocol (abbreviated as TCP) being the other one. The Internet Protocol Suit, for these reasons, is known as TCP/IP. The first ever major version of IP was the Internet Protocol Version 4 (abbreviated as IPv4). It is still the dominant protocol whose successor is Internet Protocol Version 6 (abbreviated as IPv6).
Every datagram has two parts, namely the header and the payload. For the purposes of routing and delivering datagram, the destination IP address, the source IP address, and other metadata are tagged upon the IP header. The payload on the other side is essentially the transported data. This whole process of data payload nesting in a packet tagged on a header is referred to as encapsulation. There have been security issues regarding the use of IP and therefore, it has become a subject of study for the Internet Engineering Task Force (abbreviated as IETF), which is a task force and an open standards organization that develop internet standards particularly those relating to TCP/IP.