Ever wondered how in a LAN enviornment, a Gateway understand the correct originator machine for a particular request and make sure that intended machine gets the response. For a little more background, all machines inside a LAN machine has same IP address and that is of the gateway, therefore ARP comes to the rescue at this point to ensure correct machine receives the intended response.
Address Resolution Protocol (ARP)
Posted by: Margaret Rouse
Contributor(s): Kevin Beamer and Mariusz Zydyk
Address Resolution Protocol (ARP) is a protocol for mapping an Internet Protocol address (IP address) to a physical machine address that is recognized in the local network. For example, in IP Version 4, the most common level of IP in use today, an address is 32 bits long. In an Ethernet local area network, however, addresses for attached devices are 48 bits long. (The physical machine address is also known as a Media Access Control or MAC address.) A table, usually called the ARP cache, is used to maintain a correlation between each MAC address and its corresponding IP address. ARP provides the protocol rules for making this correlation and providing address conversion in both directions.
How ARP Works
When an incoming packet destined for a host machine on a particular local area network arrives at a gateway, the gateway asks the ARP program to find a physical host or MAC address that matches the IP address. The ARP program looks in the ARP cache and, if it finds the address, provides it so that the packet can be converted to the right packet length and format and sent to the machine. If no entry is found for the IP address, ARP broadcasts a request packet in a special format to all the machines on the LAN to see if one machine knows that it has that IP address associated with it. A machine that recognizes the IP address as its own returns a reply so indicating. ARP updates the ARP cache for future reference and then sends the packet to the MAC address that replied.
Since protocol details differ for each type of local area network, there are separate ARP Requests for Comments (RFC) for Ethernet, ATM, Fiber Distributed-Data Interface, HIPPI, and other protocols.
There is a Reverse ARP (RARP) for host machines that don't know their IP address. RARP enables them to request their IP address from the gateway's ARP cache.
