an arp (address resolution protocol) comes into picture when we have the ip address of our destination but we dont know the mac address of our destination.Normally when we open a web site this is the process which takes place.IP packet transmission comes after arp when the destination mac address is obtained after arp request.so an ip packet contains both source & destination IP & mac addr.
ARP used for resolving mac address from ip address, say one client want to communicate with another and the sender knows only its destination IP address. For communication it requires the physical address of the destination, thus sender uses ARP protocol to resolve the physical address of the destination from ip address by sending arprequest to destination system.
The node sends out an ARP request with the destination IP address.
ARP
When sending information over a local area network, to a specific computer, the MAC address of the destination must be known. ARP - the address resolution protocol - takes care of that. With it, you can ask for the MAC address that corresponds to a specific IP address.
ARP, or Address Resolution Protocol, defined by RFC 826.
ARP stands for Address Resolution Protocol. This is IP's way of requesting a MAC address (or hardware address) from a host located at a certain IP address. In order for a host on a network to send a unicast packet across the network, it must know both the source and destination MAC addresses. ARP is used to obtain a MAC address similar to the way DNS is used to obtain an IP address from a domain name (www.anydomain.com).
Gratuitous in this case means a request/reply that is not normally needed according to the ARP specification (RFC 826) but could be used in some cases. A gratuitous ARP request is an AddressResolutionProtocol request packet where the source and destination IP are both set to the IP of the machine issuing the packet and the destination MAC is the broadcast address ff:ff:ff:ff:ff:ff. Ordinarily, no reply packet will occur. A gratuitous ARP reply is a reply to which no request has been made.
Arp (address resolution protocol)
The purpose of an arp request is to map an IP address to a MAC address for the link layer to transmit a packet. For example, ARP will get a request to map 1.2.3.4 to a MAC address 12:fd:23:gf .Then ARP will cache the address mapping that next time an arp request doesnt need to happen
No - in order to use ARP it would have to send a broadcast for information with a return address of itself. Since it doesn't have an IP address it cannot do that. Furthermore, without an IP address it couldn't participate on the network.
ARP is used to find a MAC (layer-2) address, if you know the IP (layer-3) address.First, a device will search its ARP cache, to see whether it already happens to have the required address. If it doesn't find the address, it will send an ARP request as a broadcast, which basically asks "Who has such-and-such an IP address?" The machine that has the requested IP address will send an ARP reply.