Non-technical reasons which need not detain us here). Significant three bytes of the MAC address) available into which to encode the IP address.Īctually, it is even worse than this.only the lower 23 bits are available for use (for The astute reader may have noticed a problem by now: There are only 24 bits (the least If we ignore the four most significant bits of the multicast IP address (which,Īs noted earlier, will always be '1110'), that leaves 28 bits of IP address information which Traffic, we would ideally like a one-to-one mapping between multicast IP addresses and multicast

Since it is obviously infeasible to have an equivalent of ARP when transmitting multicast

If you aren't interested and reading this but just need to do a conversion you can skip ahead to the Address Converter Tool. For IP multicast specifically, the Ethernet prefix

In the Ethernet world, a multicast MAC address is distinguished by a binary '1' in the least If you are looking for something to test IP multicast on your network you might like to check out our free (but very unfinished !) IP Multicast Tester Ethernet Addressing For the honours students, they are distinguished by the World, they would have been called Class D addresses (although nowadays it is not considered polite

How to convert mac address to ipv6