Ethernet Frame

A data packet on an Ethernet link is called an Ethernet packet, which transports an Ethernet frame as its payload.

An Ethernet frame is preceded by a preamble and start frame delimiter (SFD), which are both part of the Ethernet packet at the physical layer. Each Ethernet frame starts with an Ethernet header, which contains destination and source MAC addresses as its first two fields. The middle section of the frame is payload data including any headers for other protocols (for example, ) carried in the frame. The frame ends with a frame check sequence (FCS), which is a 32-bit cyclic redundancy check used to detect any in-transit corruption of data.

A data packet on the wire and the frame as its payload consist of binary data. Ethernet transmits data with the most-significant octet (byte) first; within each octet, however, the least-significant bit is transmitted first.

The internal structure of an Ethernet frame is specified in IEEE 802.3. The table below shows the complete Ethernet packet and the frame inside, as transmitted, for the payload size up to the MTU of 1500 octets. Some implementations of Gigabit Ethernet and other higher-speed variants of Ethernet support larger frames, known as jumbo frames.

The optional 802.1Q tag consumes additional space in the frame. Field sizes for this option are indicated parenthetically in the table above. IEEE 802.1ad (Q-in-Q) allows for multiple tags in each frame. This option is not illustrated here.

An Ethernet packet starts with a seven-octet preamble and one-octet start frame delimiter (SFD).

The preamble consists of a 56-bit (seven-byte) pattern of alternating 1 and 0 bits, allowing devices on the network to easily synchronize their receiver clocks, providing bit-level synchronization. It is followed by the SFD to provide byte-level synchronization and to mark a new incoming frame. For Ethernet variants transmitting serial bits instead of larger symbols, the (uncoded) on-the-wire bit pattern for the preamble together with the SFD portion of the frame is 10101010 10101010 10101010 10101010 10101010 10101010 10101010 10101011; since octets are transmitted least-significant bit first, the corresponding hexadecimal representation is 0x55 0x55 0x55 0x55 0x55 0x55 0x55 0xD5.

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