The process that maps a high-level identifier (a name or logical identifier) to a locatable network address or endpoint identifier used for delivery, producing the address information required by forwarding or connection-establishment procedures.

Principle

Address resolution separates naming from routable location: a stable or human-meaningful identifier is translated into a concrete delivery address so transport and forwarding mechanisms can operate.

Demonstration

Illustrative scenario: A client wants to contact service.example. The client issues a resolution request to a resolver, receives an IP address result, and then uses that address as the packet destination so routers can forward the packet toward the endpoint.

Misapplication

Treating address resolution as equivalent to routing—mistakenly assuming the resolver selects the network path. The semantic error is conflating the translation of identifier→address with the separate process that chooses next hops or end-to-end paths.

Consequence

When resolution succeeds and is current, higher-layer entities obtain routable addresses and delivery can proceed; when resolution fails or is stale, messages are undeliverable or misdelivered, and protocols may fall back to retries, alternate endpoints, or cached (possibly incorrect) addresses.

Reversal

In systems that embed routable location into identifiers (for example, content-addressable or flat-address schemes) or where source routing specifies the path, a distinct resolution step may be unnecessary or substantially different in role.

Boundary

Clearly within: mapping a DNS name to an IP address used for packet delivery. Boundary case: a directory that supplies service instances where additional selection/authorization is required. Clearly outside: path computation or hop-by-hop routing decisions, which use addresses but do not themselves perform identifier→address translation.

Semantic Tension

Privacy ↔ Reachability — resolving an identifier can expose the mapping between a human-friendly name and a network location, improving reachability while potentially reducing privacy.

Synthesis

Address resolution is an operational translation layer: it converts abstract identifiers into concrete delivery addresses so forwarding and connection mechanisms can act, and its correctness and freshness directly condition whether addressing yields reachability.