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If we could redesign IP to use the six byte MAC as IP addresses instead of the current 32 bit addres

Silvia Hagen
Sunny Connection AG
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IP currently uses 32 bit addresses. If we could redesign IP to use the six byte MAC as IP addresses instead of the current 32 bit addresses, would we be able to eliminate the need for ARP?
Basically the answer is yes, but you would introduce some issues with this which would have to be resolved. So my question to you is, why would you want to redesign IPv4 in such a way? If you want to do this in order to get a larger address space you'd better use IPv6, as it has a 128 bit address and doesn't use ARP anymore.
This was last published in January 2005

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