Silence on the Wire

The Missing Sentence

In the previous chapter’s discussion of the design of the Ethernet, I mentioned an interesting requirement that arises out of a need to provide reliable jam code propagation for the purpose of collision notification: the minimum size limit for an Ethernet frame.

This requirement was carried over to the official IP-over-Ethernet encapsulation specifications, such as RFC 1042, “A Standard for the Transit of Internet Protocol Datagrams Over IEEE 802 Networks,”^[66] by requiring frames that were shorter than this minimum length to be padded. The padding can be carried out at will and has no effect on the carried data on the IP layer, as the packet length specified in the IP headers does not change. Thus, the padding will not be ...