Allied Telesis AT-FS705LE - Manual (Page 21)

AT-FS705LE Installation Guide
9
MAC Address Table
The heart of an Ethernet switch is the Media
Access Control (MAC) address table. Every
device that you attach to an Ethernet network
has a MAC address. This address is assigned to
the device by the device’s manufacturer. For
example, each Network Interface Card (NIC)
that you install into your network computers
has a MAC address that was assigned to it by
the card’s manufacturer.
A switch’s MAC address table is a list of the
MAC addresses of the devices that are
connected to its ports. The switch uses this
table to direct data frames to their appropriate
destination end-nodes, and in some cases, to
discard frames that it receives. The switch
creates the MAC address table by examining
the frames that it receives on its ports. Each
frame is examined for its source address; that
is, the MAC address of the end-node that sent
the frame. The switch checks to determine
whether the address is already in its MAC
address table. If it is not, the switch adds the
address to the table along with the port number
on which the frame was received. The result is
a table that contains a list of all the MAC
addresses of end-nodes that have sent frames to
the switch and the ports on the switch to which
the end-nodes are connected.