Is the mac address specification of wireless NIC conforming to that of wireless NIC?

Question

By using OID_802_3_PERMANENT_ADDRESS, I can query the mac address of an ethernet card. Intuitively, I think there should exist corresponding OID_802_11_PERMANENT_ADDRESS. However, I find none.

If I direct use OID_802_3_PERMANENT_ADDRESS to query the mac address of 802.11, the result seems correct.

So my question is: Are the mac addresses of 802.3 and 802.11 the same in their respective specifications?

Answer 1

Although the Media Access Control for the Ethernet and wireless link layers are very different due to the nature of collision detection, to keep things simple for the Internet protocols, the MAC address – regardless of the link layer – is always a globally unique 48-bit number. This is significant for Ethernet and 802.11 since routers often aggregate devices onto a single subnet.

So to answer your question, the MAC addresses will not be same.