Internet Protocol (IP) Layer

The Internet Protocol layer handles communication from one machine to another. It accepts requests to send data from the transport layer along with an identification of the machine to which the data is to be sent. It encapsulates the data into an IP datagram, fills in the datagram header, uses the routing algorithm to determine how to deliver the datagram, and passes the datagram to the appropriate device driver for transmission.

The IP layer corresponds to the network layer in the OSI reference model. IP provides a connectionless, "unreliable" packet-forwarding service which routes packets from one system to another.