i am newbie in networking. While working on the network i have seen that switches and wifi access points do contain the ip addresses. One reason for them to have the ip address is that we can manage them from the network but my question is why do these devices have ip address while they do not need it for their working. Secondly let us suppose that there is no dhcp server configured on the network so we gave the access point an ip address that is not in the same network. Now we will not be able to connect to it on network but it will still perform its functioning that is, it will broadcast packets to the network. Isn't it logically incorrect. That a device being on the different network is routing or broadcasting data of other network.
This is edit 1:- as i myself answered the first question that they need ip address for management but point is, this is wastage of ip address. In a network when it is divided into several subnetworks sometime each network has 5-6 ip addresses then assigning one ip address to switch is wastage of one address.Should it be omitted