Mac Address

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What is MAC Address? Physical address? Hardware address in Urdu and Hindi

#MACaddress #PhysicalAddress #HardwareAddress

Posted by Technology guide in Urdu and Hindi on Wednesday, 30 December 2020

MAC Addresses is unique 48-bits address embedded into a  Network Interface card NIC during manufacturing process. These 6-byte addresses are expressed in 12 digits hexadecimal numbers. MAC Address is also known as Physical Address or Hardware address of a network device. MAC address allocation is administered by IEEE. MAC address has multiple names

  • LAN Address
  • Physical Address
  • Hardware Address
  • Burn in Address BIN

Network Interface Card NIC

The NIC a computer circuit card that makes it possible for your computer to communicate over network. It may be wireless or wired. Your computer may have more than one MAC addresses depending on number of NIC. Every router interface has a unique MAC address.

OSI Layers

It is a reference tool to understand data communications between any two networked systems. It divides the communications into seven layers. Each layer performs specific functions to support the layers above it and the layers below it. MAC address is used by Media Access Control (MAC) sub layer of Data-Link Layer (A part of OSI Layers). 

Data Link Layer is divided into two sublayers

  • LLC – Logical Link Control
  • MAC – Media Access Control

Why we use network Address

If NIC were to use IP addresses instead of MAC addresses, the IP address would have to be embedded in NIC.
Different layers need to have their own addressing scheme. We have three types of addresses: MAC addresses for the Data link layer to identify physical device, IP addresses for the network layer to identify network, and host names for the application layer.

MAC Address Structure

MAC address is Divided into two Parts

OUI organizational unique identifier is assigned to an organization by IEEE. It has 24 bits, or 3 bytes.

UAA Universal Administered Address The organization, assigns a universally administered address  of 24 bits or 3 bytes, that is unique to every adapter it manufactures.

Types of MAC Address

Uni-cast MAC Address used to send data frame to the specific network interface. If the second number in first octet of an address is set to zero (00-08-C5-01-F2-C7), the frame is meant to reach only one receiving Network Interface card.

Multicast MAC Address used to send a data frame to a group of devices. If the second number of first octet of an address is set to one (01-08-C5-01-F2-C7), the data frame is meant to reach a specific group of devices.

Broadcast MAC Address used to send data frames to all the devices in a LAN. If all the values in all octet of destination address is set to F (FF-FF-FF-FF-FF-FF) , the data frame is meant to reach all the devices in a LAN.

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