What is a MAC Address?

1. A MAC address is a Media Access Control address.
2. It is assigned at the time when a device is produced.
3. It is used to perform communication between two devices when they are in the same network segment.
4. It is also known as a burned-in address, hardware address or physical address also.
5. It is a 48-bit address and can accommodate about over 281 trillion MAC addresses.

MAC sublayer is the larger part whose subpart is a MAC Address. So now the question is

What is this MAC Sublayer?

1. It tells when the device can send data and access the channel at that time one can use
2. It is also responsible for encapsulating frames for transmission through a physical medium
3. It also resolves the addressing of the source station and the destination station
4. This is the most important function of the MAC sublayer. It performs multiple access resolutions when more than one data frame is to be transmitted.
5. It determines and controls the channel access methods for transmission. Example - CSMA/CD, ALOHA
6. It performs collision resolution I.e if multiple stations send data at same time then a collision can occur so it handles this problem also.
7. It also performs initiating retransmission in case of a collision.
8. It generates the frame check sequences and checks transmission errors

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I have covered all important things related to what is a MAC address but still if you are curious and want to dive deeper into the topic of MAC Addresses then you can also refer to the Wikipedia article below :