Ok, I have a couple of things misrepresented in the post above. Of course ARP refers to address resolution protocol and that really refers to the relationship of IP addresses to MAC addresses. Therefore my use of ARP above is not correct. Also, I need to correct myself on the use of level 1. IP is level 3 and MAC (media access control) is level 2 and of course the physical medium is level 1.
I am refering to level 2 and the MAC protocols. Now just like in IP in MAC you have a broadcast address as well such as FF:FF:FF:FF:FF:FF. If this address is sent out, all devices will recieve the transmission.
Here is a quote from wikipedia:
“Ethernet frames with a value of 1 in the least-significant bit of the first octet[note 2] of the [URL=“http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ethernet_address”]destination address are treated as multicast frames and are flooded to all points on the network. While frames with ones in all bits of the destination address (FF:FF:FF:FF:FF:FF) are sometimes referred to as [URL=“http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Broadcasting_(computing)”]broadcasts, Ethernet network equipment generally does not distinguish between multicast and broadcast frames.”
So I don’t know how Mikrotik is implementing it, however, I suspect they are including some code in the stack of each device that will respond to a multicast address.
