Outlining IPv4

In 1981, Request for Comments (RFC) 791 outlined the specifications for IPv4. The RFC outlined that IPv4 had two principal tasks, addressing and fragmentation, as defined in Section 1.4. Operation, found at https://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc791#section-1.4.

As stated, one of the original roles of IPv4 was fragmentation, which breaks packets apart. At the time, this was necessary because, in the early 1980s, most of the networks had limited bandwidth and were unable to transmit large packets.

Over time, efforts have been made to upgrade and replace the antiquated data pathways, and much of the internet has been replaced by high-speed, fiber optic cables. As a result, in today's networks, fragmentation is rarely used.

Note

Fragmentation is used when the maximum transmission unit (MTU) is less than 1,500 bytes.

As time has passed, we can see that IPv4 is still influential in addressing, along with the role of routing, in order to get data to its final...