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The Address Resolution Protocol (ARP) is a communication protocol used in Internet Protocol (IP) networks to map an IP address to a physical or Media Access Control (MAC) address. ARP operates at the second layer of the OSI model, the Data Link layer.
ARP is essential because while IP addresses are used at the Network layer (Layer 3) of the OSI model, MAC addresses are required at the Data Link layer (Layer 2) for final delivery of data packets to devices on the same network.
History of ARP
The Address Resolution Protocol (ARP) was first described in 1982 in RFC 826, a document of the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF). This was during the early days of the Internet, when the TCP/IP protocol suite was being developed and standardized.
ARP was designed to resolve the issue of mapping a known IP address to a MAC (Media Access Control) address on an Ethernet network. At that time, Ethernet was becoming the dominant networking technology, and there was a need for a robust and efficient way to translate IP addresses to the physical addresses used by Ethernet.
The creator of ARP, Dr. David C. Plummer, was a research staff member at MIT when he proposed ARP. He was also involved in the early development of the Internet and contributed to…
