In the text book: Computer Networks 5th edition by Peterson and Davie, I found "The designers of IP decided that fragmentation should always happen on 8-byte boundaries, which means that the offset field counts 8-byte chunks, not bytes".
Why the offset field is designed as a multiple of 8 ? I don't understand the significance of this. Also, what happens if the MTU-offset is not a multiple of 8 ? (e.g) If MTU = 1502 bytes, 20 bytes for header and 1482 bytes for data. In this case, what would be fragment offset in the second fragment, as 1482 is not a mutilple of 8.