A Media Access Control address (MAC address) is a unique identifier assigned to network interfaces for communications on the physical network segment. MAC addresses are used for numerous network technologies and most IEEE 802 network technologies including Ethernet. Logically, MAC addresses are used in the Media Access Control protocol sub-layer of the OSI reference model.
MAC addresses are most often assigned by the manufacturer of a network interface card (NIC) and are stored in its hardware, the card's read-only memory, or some other firmware mechanism. If assigned by the manufacturer, a MAC address usually encodes the manufacturer's registered identification number and may be referred to as the burned-in address. It may also be known as an Ethernet hardware address (EHA), hardware address or physical address.
MAC addresses are formed according to the rules of one of three numbering name spaces managed by the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE): MAC-48, EUI-48, and EUI-64. The IEEE claims trademarks on the names EUI-48 and EUI-64, in which EUI is an acronym for Extended Unique Identifier.
Contents [hide]
1 Notational conventions
2 Address details
2.1 Individual address block
3 Usage
4 Bit-reversed notation
5 See also
6 References
7 External links
[edit]Notational conventions
The standard (IEEE 802) format for printing MAC-48 addresses in human-friendly form is six groups of two hexadecimal digits, separated by hyphens (-) or colons (:), in transmission order, e.g. 01-23-45-67-89-ab, 01:23:45:67:89:ab. This form is also commonly used for EUI-64. Another convention commonly used by networking equipment uses three groups of four hexadecimal digits separated by dots (.), e.g. 0123.4567.89ab; again in transmission order.[citation needed]
[edit]Address details
The original IEEE 802 MAC address comes from the original Xerox Ethernet addressing scheme.[1] This 48-bit address space contains potentially 248 or 281,474,976,710,656 possible MAC addresses.
All three numbering systems use the same format and differ only in the length of the identifier. Addresses can either be universally administered addresses or locally administered addresses. A universally administered address is uniquely assigned to a device by its manufacturer; these are sometimes called burned-in addresses. The first three octets (in transmission order) identify the organization that issued the identifier and are known as the Organizationally Unique Identifier (OUI).[2] The following three (MAC-48 and EUI-48) or five (EUI-64) octets are assigned by that organization in nearly any manner they please, subject to the constraint of uniqueness. The IEEE expects the MAC-48 space to be exhausted no sooner than the year 2100;[3] EUI-64s are not expected to run out in the foreseeable future. A locally administered address is assigned to a device by a network administrator, overriding the burned-in address. Locally administered addresses do not contain OUIs.
Universally administered and locally administered addresses are distinguished by setting the second least significant bit of the most significant byte of the address. If the bit is 0, the address is universally administered. If it is 1, the address is locally administered. In the example address 06-00-00-00-00-01 the most significant byte is 06 (hex), the binary form of which is 00000110, where the second least significant bit is 1. Therefore, it is a locally administered address.[4] Consequently, this bit is 0 in all OUIs.
If the least significant bit of the most significant octet of an address is set to 0 (zero), the frame is meant to reach only one receiving NIC.[5] This type of transmission is called unicast. A unicast frame is transmitted to all nodes within the collision domain, which typically ends at the nearest network switch or router. Only the node with the matching hardware MAC address will accept the frame; network frames with non-matching MAC-addresses are ignored, unless the device is in promiscuous mode.[citation needed]
If the least significant bit of the most significant address octet is set to 1, the packet will still be sent only once; however, NICs will choose to accept it based on different criteria than a matching MAC address: for example, based on a configurable list of accepted multicast MAC addresses. This is called multicast addressing.
The following technologies use the MAC-48 identifier format:
Ethernet
802.11 wireless networks
Bluetooth
IEEE 802.5 token ring
most other IEEE 802 networks
FDDI
ATM (switched virtual connections only, as part of an NSAP address)
Fibre Channel and Serial Attached SCSI (as part of a World Wide Name)
The ITU-T G.hn standard, which provides a way to create a high-speed (up to 1 gigabit/s) local area network using existing home wiring (power lines, phone lines and coaxial cables). The G.hn Application Protocol Convergence (APC) layer accepts Ethernet frames that use the MAC-48 format and encapsulates them into G.hn Medium Access Control Service Data Units (MSDUs).
The distinction between EUI-48 and MAC-48 identifiers is purely nominal: MAC-48 is used for network hardware; EUI-48 is used to identify other devices and software. (Thus, by definition, an EUI-48 is not in fact a "MAC address", although it is syntactically indistinguishable from one and assigned from the same numbering space.)
The IEEE now considers the label MAC-48 to be an obsolete term which was previously used to refer to a specific type of EUI-48 identifier used to address hardware interfaces within existing 802-based networking applications and should not be used in the future. Instead, the proprietary term EUI-48 should be used for this purpose.
EUI-64 identifiers are used in:
FireWire
IPv6 (as the least-significant 64 bits of a unicast network address or link-local address when stateless autoconfiguration is used)
ZigBee / 802.15.4 / 6LoWPAN wireless personal-area networks
The IEEE has built in several special address types to allow more than one network interface card to be addressed at one time:
Packets sent to the broadcast address, all one bits, are received by all stations on a local area network. In hexadecimal the broadcast address would be FF:FF:FF:FF:FF:FF. A broadcast frame is flooded and arrives at all nodes. It is accepted by all nodes.
Packets sent to a multicast address are received by all stations on a LAN that have been configured to receive packets sent to that address.That is, a multicast frame is accepted by nodes that have the same multicast address.
Functional addresses identify one or more Token Ring NICs that provide a particular service, defined in IEEE 802.5.
These are group addresses, as opposed to individual addresses; the least significant bit of the first octet of a MAC address distinguishes individual addresses from group addresses. That bit is set to 0 in individual addresses and 1 in group addresses. Group addresses, like individual addresses, can be universally administered or locally administered.
In addition, the EUI-64 numbering system encompasses both MAC-48 and EUI-48 identifiers by a simple translation mechanism. To convert a MAC-48 into an EUI-64, copy the OUI, append the two octets FF-FF, and then copy the organization-specified part. To convert an EUI-48 into an EUI-64, the same process is used, but the sequence inserted is "FF-FE". In both cases, the process can be trivially reversed when necessary. Organizations issuing EUI-64s are cautioned against issuing identifiers that could be confused with these forms. The IEEE policy is to discourage new uses of 48-bit identifiers in favor of the EUI-64 system. IPv6—one of the most prominent standards that uses EUI-64—treats MAC-48 as EUI-48 instead (as it is chosen from the same address pool). This results in extending MAC addresses (such as IEEE 802 MAC address) to EUI-64 using FF-FE rather than FF-FF.