The Network Layer|Technical Support Fundamentals|Coursera|Google IT Support Professional Certificate
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On a local area network or LAN,
nodes can communicate with each other through their physical MAC addresses.
This works well on small scale because switches can quickly learn the MAC
addresses connected to each other ports to forward transmissions appropriately.
But MAC addressing isn't a scheme that scales well,
every single network interface on the planet has a unique MAC address and
they aren't ordered in any systematic way.
There is no way of knowing where on the planet a certain MAC address might be
at any one point in time, so it's not ideal for communicating across distances.
Later on in this lesson, when we introduce ARP or Address Resolution Protocol,
you'll see that the way that nodes learn about each other's physical addressing
isn't translatable to anything besides a single network signet anyway.
Clearly we need another solution, and that is the network layer,
and the internet protocol or IP in the IP addresses that come along with it.
By the end of this lesson you'll be able to take identify an IP address,
describe how IP datagrams are encapsulated inside the payload of an ethernet frame
and correctly identify and describe the many fields of an IP datagram header.