Changes

When the Internet was in its infancy and before IP addresses were first created, responsible engineers had to decide how long an IP address should be. Since data is exchanged through the Internet via data packets and every data packet has to contain the sender's and receiver's IP addresses, the length of an IP address would determine how large packets would be. A short IP address would mean smaller data packets but fewer possible IP addresses and ''vice versa''.  

When the Internet was in its infancy and before IP addresses were first created, responsible engineers had to decide how long an IP address should be. Since data is exchanged through the Internet via data packets and every data packet has to contain the sender's and receiver's IP addresses, the length of an IP address would determine how large packets would be. A short IP address would mean smaller data packets but fewer possible IP addresses and ''vice versa''.  

32-bit length IP addresses were chosen and this is what we call '''IPv4''' today. A 32-bit length means that there can be 2³² or 4,294,967,296 distinct IP addresses.  

32-bit length IP addresses were chosen and this is what we call '''IPv4''' today. A 32-bit length means that there can be 2³² or 4,294,967,296 distinct IP addresses which is nearly not enough to meet the demand of today's internet savvy society - with over 7 billion people in the world and countless more devices there is just no way that only 4.2 billion unique address would suffice. NAT solves this problem by remapping one IP address space into another by modifying network address information in IP header of packets. This way several devices can use one '''Public IP address''' to send and receive packets through the Internet.