Department of Computer Science and Engineering

CS 179i:  Project in Computer Science / Networks

Spring 2014

Suggested Topic: Managing locally-administered Ethernet addresses in a thoughtful way

Possible topic options include:
  1. Modify DHCP, for dynamic allocation of IP addresses, to add the option to give out a MAC address at the same time. Note that this change is complicated by the fact that DHCP currently uses the MAC address as a unique ID for identifying the current borrower of an IP address, so you will need to invent some other mechanism(s).

  1. Design a layer-2 MAC Address Translation (MAT) capability that can be added to layer-2 bridges to manage locally-assigned MAC addresses. In this case, assume that each bridge in a layer-2 network has its own block of locally-assigned MAC addresses, and is responsible for making sure that the only locally-assigned MAC addresses that get sent throught its "uplink ports" (i.e., connecting to other cooperating bridges, not end nodes or non-cooperating bridges) come from its own address block.
Note that MAT-capable bridges could be used for much more than removal of stray locally-assigned MAC addresses. In particular, if *every* host had its MAC address replaced by a local one assigned by its closest bridge, then we would have a scalable system for large data center networks, where bridges only need to store the high-order bits of a MAC address (i.e., the 24-bit "Organizationally Unique Identifier" that defines each address block) in its forwarding table, rather than the full 48-bit address for every active host.