
The ARP protocol is used to associate a logical address with a physical or MAC address.It is provided by the device's vendor at the time of manufacturing and embedded in its NIC, which is ideally cannot be changed.It works on the data link layer of the OSI model.It is 12-digit, and 48 bits long, out of which the first 24 bits are used for OUI(Organization Unique Identifier), and 24 bits are for NIC/vendor-specific.It is represented in a hexadecimal format on each device, such as 00:0a:95:9d:67:16. It is globally unique it means two devices cannot have the same MAC address.


MAC address is the physical address, which uniquely identifies each device on a given network.
