Ethernet at the Data Link Layer

Ethernet at the Data Link layer is responsible for Ethernet addressing, commonly referred to as hardware addressing or MAC addressing. Ethernet is also responsible for framing packets received from the Network layer and preparing them for transmission on the local network through the Ethernet contention media-access method.

Ethernet MAC addresses are made up of hexadecimal addresses. So before I discuss MAC addresses, let’s start by talking about binary, decimal, and hexadecimal addresses and how to convert one to another.

Binary to Decimal and Hexadecimal Conversion

Understanding the differences between binary, decimal, and hexadecimal numbers and how to convert one format into the other is very important before we move on to discussing the TCP/IP protocol stack and IP addressing in Chapter 6 and Chapter 7, “IP Addressing.”