To send and receive information from any device, you need an IP address. But how do you get one? And what can it be used for? Well, imagine Nicola and her friends decide to head out one evening to the theater. When they arrive there, the clerk greets them, and they buy their tickets. He assigns each of them a seat, but before they head in, they explain that one of their party, Tasha is as always late. 

He tells them that this isn't a problem and asks if they want to register their names against their seats, so that Tasha can find them when she arrives. They do and he files this information away. A little later, Tasha arrives and asks the clerk where she can find her friends. He checks the system and finds where Nicola and her friends are and sends Tasha in.

Now, this is exactly how DHCP works. DHCP servers give the DHCP clients an IP address, the DHCP server in our story is the theater clerk. And of course Nicola and her friends are DHCP clients. When the clerk gave them each unique seats, it was like a DHCP server giving a device an IP address. When they registered their names against their seats, or in other words, their IP address, they were registering with a DNS server. 

The DNS server works like a phonebook of the Internet. When we need to find something on the Internet, if it's been registered with a DNS server, we can query that server and it can tell us where the site we're looking for is, and this is how Tasha could find Nicola and the rest of her friends so easily. So DHCP servers provide devices with IP addresses, which can be registered against the DNS server so that other devices on the Internet can easily find and communicate with them.