IP(Internet Protocol)

What does IP do?

IP is responsible
for routing of the packets or the datagrams, it transports datagrams or the packets from a source to a destination. This is called routing. So, it will decide which node to forward it the packet next, that next node will again decide where to forward that packet next, this way the packet will finally reach the destination. So, the network layer or the IP layer in each of these nodes will be responsible for this routing or packet forwarding.

This IP has an additional responsibility , if it finds that a packet is large, too large, it may break a packet into smaller packets, this is called fragmentation. The point to note is that IP uses datagrams and when you talked about datagrams, datagram is an unreliable service; unreliable in the sense that some datagrams might get lost, some duplicates might get generated, datagrams maybe received out of order at the destination. So, such scenarios may happen. So, means if you are using IP, you must be aware of these problems that some packet may actually get lost fine.