Wednesday, December 16, 2020

Media Address Control (MAC) Sub Layer

To gain an appreciation of the characteristics of addressing, it is helpful to bring forward an example that may be familiar and easy to understand.

Let’s think about this in terms of a mobile home community. Each of the mobile homes have a serial number permanently attached to the home’s frame. Computers have a similar address, called its media access control (MAC) address. That address is “burnt” on to the computers network interface card and is unique in nature. An example of the MAC address is shown in figure 1 below.

Another layer 2 function is to establish protocols that relate to the structure of data frames that are placed on the network for data transmission. Uniformity is an important characteristic and includes placing both addresses for the data sender as well as the data recipient. Figure 2 below provides an example of an Ethernet II frame.

Each frame includes the MAC address of the source of the frame and the MAC address of the intended recipient. When a device sends a packet to the broadcast MAC address (FF:FF:FF:FF:FF:FF), it is delivered to all stations on the local network.

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