a What is the differences between physical and logical addre

a) What is the differences between physical and logical address, and why do we need logical addresses?

b) Discuss IPv4 and IPv6 according to it capabilities to address a single device on any network in the world and how it correlates to the Internet of Things (IoT).

Solution

a) What is the differences between physical and logical address, and why do we need logical addresses?
A physical address is a 48-bit MAC address which is built into the NIC card usually, and cannot be changed.
Whereas, the logical address is the 43-bit IP address assigned to the machine by the admin, for
the purpose of routing between networks.
b) Discuss IPv4 and IPv6 according to it capabilities to address a single device on any network
in the world and how it correlates to the Internet of Things (IoT).
IPv4 is a 32-bit address used by an individual device, to be uniquely identified in a network.
IPv4 can identify a total of 2^32 i.e., 4.3 billion addresses. But in the world of IoT, the
devices that require unique addresses is growing exponentially, and this IPv4 addressing is
not enough to assign unique addresses to every device. Therefore, at this point a new extension
to IPv4 called IPv6 has been developed which is a 128-bit IP address, and therefore, could
handle 2^128 devices, which is far larger than IPv4.