Address Resolution Protocol (ARP) is situated at the bottom half of the Network layer. It can be considered as a mechanism for mapping or translation of addresses between the Network logical addresses and MAC (Media Access Control) layer physical addresses. For instance the MAC layer uses a 48-bit address whereas the Ethernet uses a 32-bit address. ARP provides the mechanism to translate the MAC addresses to IP addresses and vice versa using a lookup table like data structure, called the ARP cache.
The greatest advantage of using an ARP is its simplicity since it does not have to perform any kind to computations or otherwise except than to use the look up table and assign each machine an IP address and decide about subnet masks. ARP does the rest. One of the basic communications protocols is the ARP that resolves the IP addresses used by various networking equipment into network usable format that used by LANs.
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