Introduction to Ethernet

Introduction

Ethernet was designed in the 1970s at the Palo Alto Research Center. The first prototype used a coaxial cable as the shared medium and 3 Mbps of bandwidth.

First Official Ethernet Specification

Ethernet was improved during the late 1970s and in the 1980s, Digital Equipment, Intel and Xerox published the first official Ethernet specification.

Important Parameters

This specification defines several important parameters for Ethernet networks.

1. The first decision was to standardize the commercial Ethernet at 10 Mbps.

2. The second decision was the duration of the slot time. In Ethernet, a long slot time enables networks to span a long distance but forces the host to use a larger minimum frame size. The compromise was a slot time of $51.2$ microseconds, which corresponds to a minimum frame size of $64$ ...