If I were to give two computers or two public IP addresses, let them communicate, why still want to use the MAC address?

CodePudding user response:

IP is addressing at the network layer and MAC is at the data link layer address,

CodePudding user response:

The MAC is not separate for TCP/IP protocol, early in the development of the network, there are a lot of non tcpip transport protocol, development up to now, only tcpip has become the most popular and widely used, the first experiment is one-to-one transmission, then had not tcpip, to identify different equipment, relying on the MAC,
In today's architecture and system view, if there is no MAC address, every card after his packet all interrupt taken up to judge whether to him, have the MAC only for their own or broadcast multicast address packets will be nic, this overhead is decreased obviously, MAC and switches can quickly find the identity of the port forwarding, if not, switch to put a package in all port forwarding...