STANDARD ETHERNET

The original Ethernet was created in 1976 at Xerox's Palo Alto Research Center (PARC). Since then, it has gone through four generations: Standard Ethernet (lot Mbps), Fast Ethernet (100 Mbps), Gigabit Ethernet (l Gbps), and Ten-Gigabit Ethernet (l0 Gbps), as shown in Figure We briefly discuss all these generations starting with the first, Standard (or traditional) Ethernet.

MAC Sublayer

In Standard Ethernet, the MAC sublayer governs the operation of the access method. It also frames data received from the upper layer and passes them to the physical layer.

Frame Format

The Ethernet frame contains seven fields: preamble, SFD, DA, SA, length or type of protocol data unit (PDU), upper-layer data, and the CRe. Ethernet does not provide any mechanism for acknowledging received frames, making it what is known as an unreliable medium. Acknowledgments must be implemented at the higher layers. The format ofthe MAC frame is shown in Figure

Frame Length

Ethernet has imposed restrictions on both the minimum and maximum lengths of a frame, as shown in Figure

The minimum length restriction is required for the correct operation of CSMAlCD as we will see shortly. An Ethernet frame needs to have a minimum length of 512 bits or 64 bytes. Part of this length is the header and the trailer. If we count 18 bytes of header and trailer (6 bytes of source address, 6 bytes of destination address, 2 bytes of length or type, and 4 bytes of CRC), then the minimum length of data from the upper layer is 64 - 18 = 46 bytes. If the upper-layer packet is less than 46 bytes, padding is added to make up the difference.

The standard defines the maximum length of a frame (without preamble and SFD field) as 1518 bytes. If we subtract the 18 bytes of header and trailer, the maximum length of the payload is 1500 bytes. The maximum length restriction has two historical reasons. First, memory was very expensive when Ethernet was designed: a maximum length restriction helped to reduce the size of the buffer. Second, the maximum length restriction prevents one station from monopolizing the shared medium, blocking other stations that have data to send.