We have seen why it is important to identify hosts and networks uniquely to be able to deliver packets reliably. Depending on the scale, there are three major ways of doing this; we will discuss each of those in this section. The end to end process of IP routing will be discussed in the next section. One interesting fact to note is that for each of these addressing modes, one or more addresses are reserved for special use. Often, these are marked by a known set of bits being on or off in a known pattern:
- Ethernet address: This is also known as a Media Access Control (MAC) address. It is a 48-bit long unique identifier assigned to a network device (usually stored on the card) that is used to identify it in a network ...
