Short for
Media Access Control address, a hardware address that uniquely identifies each
node of a
network. In
IEEE 802 networks, the
Data Link Control (DLC) layer of the
OSI Reference Model is divided into two sublayers: the
Logical Link Control (LLC) layer and the
Media Access Control (MAC) layer. The MAC layer interfaces directly with the network medium. Consequently, each different type of network medium requires a different MAC layer.
On networks that do not conform to the IEEE 802 standards but do conform to the OSI Reference Model, the node address is called the Data Link Control (DLC) address.
See a breakdown of the seven OSI layers in the Quick Reference section of Webopedia.
