Medium Access Control Sublayer
MAC is a sublayer of the DLL of the open system interconnections or OSI reference model for data transmission.
The open system interconnections is a layered networking framework that explains how communication is done between heterogeneous systems.
It can be divided into two logical layers :
- The Logical Link Sublayer
- The Medium Access Control Sublayer
Functions of the medium access control sublayer:
- A frame check sequence is generated that contributes to protection against transmission errors.
- It performs collision resolution and retransmission.
- It resolves the addressing of source station.
- It provides abstraction of the physical layer of LLC.
- It encapsulates frames so that they are suitable for transmission through a physical medium.
MAC Address
MAC address acts as a unique identifier allotted to a network interface controller (NIC) of a device. It works as a network address for data transmission between a network segment. It is assigned to a network adaptor at the time of manufacturing. It comprises six groups of two hexadecimal digits, separated by hyphens, or colons.