Month: November 2011

Data Packet – IP Packet – What is this packet story all about?

From the computer networking point of view, a packet is referred to a planned data unit. But certain computer communication links such as point to point communication don’t support data packets. In such cases, data is simply transmitted as an array of bytes or characters etc over the medium. Anyway, transformation of data into packets is a good way to achieve better bitrate of a communication medium in the course of sharing data amongst the users.

MAC address (MAC L2 addressing) – What is this physical addressing?

MAC address, what that means and what MAC address actually is?

Let’s make it simple

The Layer 2 address is unique on the local network and represents the address of the end device on the physical media. In a LAN using Ethernet, this address is called the Media Access Control (MAC) address. When two end devices communicate on the local Ethernet network, the frames that are exchanged between them contain the destination and source MAC addresses. So we can say that unique identifier called a Media Access Control (MAC) address was created to help in finding the source and destination address in an Ethernet network. MAC addressing is added as part of a Layer 2 ethernet frame. An Ethernet MAC address is a 48-bit binary value expressed as 12 hexadecimal digits.