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The Internet Protocol (IP) is a data-oriented protocol used by source and destination hosts for communicating data across a packet-switched internetwork.

Data in an IP internetwork are sent in blocks referred to as packets or datagrams (the terms are basically synonymous in IP). In particular, in IP no setup is needed before a host tries to send packets to a host it has previously not communicated with.

The Internet Protocol provides an unreliable datagram service (also called best effort); i.e. it makes almost no guarantees about the packet. The packet may arrive damaged, it may be out of order (compared to other packets sent between the same hosts), it may be duplicated, or it may be dropped entirely. If the application needs reliability, this is added by the Transport layer.

Packet switches, or internetwork routers, forward IP datagrams across interconnected layer 2 networks. The lack of any delivery guarantees means that the design of packet switches is made much simpler. (Note that if the network does drop, reorder or otherwise damage a lot of packets, the performance seen by the user will be poor, so most network elements do try hard to not do these things - hence the best effort term. However, an occasional error will produce no noticeable effect.)

IP is the common element found in today's public Internet. The current and most popular network layer protocol in use today is IPv4; this version of the protocol is assigned version 4. IPv6 is the proposed successor to IPv4; the Internet is slowly running out of addresses, and IPv6 has 128-bit source and destination addresses, providing more addresses than IPv4's 32 bits. Versions 0 through 3 were either reserved or unused. Version 5 was used for an experimental stream protocol. Other version numbers have been assigned, usually for experimental protocols, but have not been widely used.