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A MAC address (short for medium access control address) is a unique identifier assigned to a network interface controller (NIC) for use as a network address in communications within a network segment. This use is common in most IEEE 802 networking technologies, including Ethernet, Wi-Fi, and Bluetooth. Within the Open Systems Interconnection ...
The local network addresses used in IEEE 802 networks and FDDI networks are called MAC addresses; they are based on the addressing scheme that was used in early Ethernet implementations. A MAC address is intended as a unique serial number. MAC addresses are typically assigned to network interface hardware at the time of manufacture.
A network switch is a multiport network bridge that uses MAC addresses to forward data at the data link layer (layer 2) of the OSI model. Some switches can also forward data at the network layer (layer 3) by additionally incorporating routing functionality. Such switches are commonly known as layer-3 switches or multilayer switches.
In Ethernet networks, each NIC has a unique Media Access Control (MAC) address—usually stored in the controller's permanent memory. To avoid address conflicts between network devices, the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE) maintains and administers MAC address uniqueness. The size of an Ethernet MAC address is six octets ...
Ethernet ( / ˈiːθərnɛt / EE-thər-net) is a family of wired computer networking technologies commonly used in local area networks (LAN), metropolitan area networks (MAN) and wide area networks (WAN). [ 1] It was commercially introduced in 1980 and first standardized in 1983 as IEEE 802.3. Ethernet has since been refined to support higher ...
A multicast address is a logical identifier for a group of hosts in a computer network that are available to process datagrams or frames intended to be multicast for a designated network service. Multicast addressing can be used in the link layer (layer 2 in the OSI model ), such as Ethernet multicast, and at the internet layer (layer 3 for OSI ...
It is immediately followed by the Ethernet frame, which starts with the destination MAC address. [ 1] In computer networking, an Ethernet frame is a data link layer protocol data unit and uses the underlying Ethernet physical layer transport mechanisms. In other words, a data unit on an Ethernet link transports an Ethernet frame as its payload.
Broadcast address. A broadcast address is a network address used to transmit to all devices connected to a multiple-access communications network. A message sent to a broadcast address may be received by all network-attached hosts. In contrast, a multicast address is used to address a specific group of devices, and a unicast address is used to ...