Introduction to tcp/IP

What does Broadcast Address mean?

A broadcast address is a special Internet Protocol (IP) address used to transmit messages and data packets to network systems. Network administrators (NA) verify successful data packet transmission via broadcast addresses.

Dynamic Host Configuration Protocol (DHCP) and Bootstrap Protocol (BOOTP) clients use broadcast IP addresses to locate and transmit respective server requests.

There are three types of Ethernet addresses:

There are three types of Ethernet addresses:

• Unicast addresses – represent a single LAN interface. A unicast frame will be sent to a specific device, not to a group of devices on the LAN.
• Multicast addresses – represent a group of devices in a LAN. A frame sent to a multicast address will be forwarded to a group of devices on the LAN.
• Broadcast addresses – represent all device on the LAN. Frames sent to a broadcast address will be delivered to all devices on the LAN.
• The unicast address will have the value of the MAC address of the destination device.
• Multicast frames have a value of 1 in the least-significant bit of the first octet of the destination address. This helps a network switch to distinguish between unicast and multicast addresses. One example of an Ethernet multicast address would be 01:00:0C:CC:CC:CC, which is an address used by CDP (Cisco Discovery Protocol).
• The broadcast address has the value of FFFF.FFFF.FFFF (all binary ones). The switch will flood broadcast frames out all ports except the port that it was received on.

Basics of IP Address

What does Internet Protocol Address (IP Address) mean?

An Internet Protocol address (IP address) is a logical numeric address that is assigned to every single computer, printer, switch, router or any other device that is part of a TCP/IP-based network.

The IP address is the core component on which the networking architecture is built; no network exists without it. An IP address is a logical address that is used to uniquely identify every node in the network.