Q1. Describe the IP Protocol. What is DNS?

Answer:

DNS is Domain Name System and means a service which enables clients to locate computers on the Internet given their symbolic nam. (Ince, 2004, p.443)
Wikipedia-1 (2009) describes that the Domain Name System (DNS) is a hierarchical naming system for computers, services, or any resource participating in the Internet. It associates various information with domain names assigned to such participants. Most importantly, it translates domain names meaningful to humans into the numerical (binary) identifiers associated with networking equipment for the purpose of locating and addressing these devices world-wide. An often used analogy to explain the Domain Name System is that it serves as the "phone book" for the Internet by translating human-friendly computer hostnames into IP addresses. For example, www.example.com translates to 208.77.188.166.

IP Protocol is one of a suite of protocols used for communication within the Internet. (Ince, 2004, p.444)
Wikipedia-2 (2009) describes that the Internet Protocol (IP) is a protocol used for communicating data across a packet-switched internetwork using the Internet Protocol Suite. IP is the primary protocol in the Internet Layer of the Internet Protocol Suite and has the task of delivering distinguished protocol datagrams (packets) from the source host to the destination host solely based on their addresses. For this purpose the Internet Protocol defines addressing methods and structures for datagram encapsulation. The first major version of addressing structure, now referred to as Internet Protocol Version (IPv4) is still the dominant protocol of the Internet, although the successor, Internet Protocol Version 6 (IPv6) is being deployed actively worldwide. Data from an upper layer protocol is encapsulated as packets/datagrams (the terms are basically synonymous in IP). Circuit setup is not needed before a host may send packets to another host that it has previously not communicated with (a characteristic of packet-switched networks), thus IP is a connectionless protocol.

Reference:

1. Ince Darrel (2004). "Developing Distributed and E-commerce Applications", 2nd Edition. United States of America, Pearson Education Limited. (p.443-444)
2. Wikipedia-1 (2009). "Domain Name System". Wikipedia The Free Encyclopedia, Retrieved Mar-14th-2009 from URL - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Domain_Name_System
3. Wikipedia-2 (2009). "Internet Protocol". Wikipeddia The Free Encyclopedia, Retrieved Mar-14th-2009 from URL - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internet_Protocol