what internet protocol looks for the mac address of a remote network

For the packet to be sent between each link, knowing the MAC address of the receiving router or computers interface is critical.

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It is becoming commonplace to have more than one Ethernet adapter in a PC or embedded controller, especially in systems where wired and wireless adapters are both present.

This tutorial outlines basic Ethernet networking concepts, explains why incorporating multiple NICs can cause problems, and provides best practices to follow when working with a multi-NIC system.

In addition, several common scenarios are explored, including an NI Real-Time Hypervisor system that features a complex network configuration.

MAC addresses consist of 48 bits, and are commonly expressed in groups of 2 hexadecimal digits (e.g.

The MAC address or addresses for a specific Ethernet adapter are commonly printed on a label on the device itself, and are also accessible via operating system networking settings.

Each interface is continually listening for packets sent to its unique address.

If multiple NICs are installed in one computer, they each have their own MAC addresses.

First, with such a large shared connection packet collisions would occur frequently, causing communication to be unreliable.

Second, storing the address of every other computer on the planet on each machine would require a large amount of memory, and is not a good strategy due to the constant addition of new devices.

In practice, users can assign one or more Internet Protocol (IP) addresses to each MAC address, and set these IP addresses up in such a way that most network traffic occurs in small pools rather than across a wider group of machines.

In practice, IP addresses are typically specified by a 32-bit value, and are commonly written as four groups of 3-digit decimal values (e.g.

Consider a network with 10 computers configured such that the computers have IP addresses ranging from 192.168.100.0 to 192.168.100.9.

If all machines follow a rule where all addresses with format 192.168.100.xxx are assumed to be inside the internal network, then it is easy to tell whether communicating with a given IP address requires accessing some other network or not.

Whereas MAC addresses do not typically follow a pattern in a given set of machines (they are randomly distributed by vendor), since IP addresses are user-configurable they can be set up to follow a logical, hierarchical pattern.

Using this pattern, small groups of computers can communicate with each other with only local traffic, therefore reducing data collisions in the larger network.

In addition, since there are more than 232 connected Ethernet devices on the planet, IP addresses can be reused across multiple smaller networks while those machines are still accessible via a process called Network Address Translation (NAT).

A detailed discussion of NAT is beyond the scope of this tutorial.

The next version of the Internet Protocol, IPv6, uses 128-bit addresses but is not widely used today (although adoption is expected to grow in the next several years).

On the contrary, a binary zero in a given position means that if the IP address bit is different then it does not matter; if all other bits are the same between the sender and receivers IP address then the receiver is assumed to be on the same local network.

For each Ethernet adapter connected to a computer, the user often specifies an IP address, subnet mask, and default gateway.

The default gateway is the address of the router that should be used when packets must be sent outside of the local network.

IP addresses provide some advantages including the use of subnets, but keep in mind that simply knowing the IP address of a remote computers interface is not enough information to ensure that a packet reaches that computer.

For example, to communicate between two computers on remote networks it may be necessary to pass through several routers.

At a low-level, one packet must be sent between the sending computer and the first router, then another packet from the first router to the next, and so forth until the final packet finally reaches the destination computer.

What Internet Protocol Looks For The Mac Address Of A Remote Network