IP address
An IP address serves two principal functions. It identifies the host, or more specifically its network interface, and it provides the location of the host in the network, and thus the capability of establishing a path to that host. Its role has been characterized as follows: "A name indicates what we seek. An address indicates where it is. A route indicates how to get there."
The header of each IP packet contains the IP address of the sending host, and that of the destination host.
SIP URI scheme
As a SIP address is text, much like an e-mail address, it may contain non-numeric characters. As the client may be a SIP phone or other device with just a numeric, telephone-like keypad, various schemes exist to associate an entirely numeric identifier to a publicly reachable SIP address. These include the iNum Initiative (which issues E.164-formatted numbers, where the corresponding SIP address is the number '@sip.inum.net'), SIP Broker-style services (which associate a numeric *prefix to the SIP domain name) and the e164.org and e164.arpa domain name servers (which convert numbers to addresses one-by-one as DNS reverse-lookups).