Which protocol is primarily responsible for mapping IP addresses to MAC addresses?

The protocol that is primarily responsible for mapping IP addresses to MAC addresses is ARP, which stands for Address Resolution Protocol. In a network environment, devices communicate using IP addresses, but the actual data transmission over Ethernet requires MAC addresses. ARP plays a crucial role in this process by sending out a broadcast request to discover the MAC address that corresponds to a specific IP address. When a device wants to send data to another device on the same local network, it needs to know the MAC address of that device. ARP facilitates this by enabling devices to resolve IP addresses into their corresponding MAC addresses, thereby ensuring successful data transmission over the network.

Other protocols listed in the choices serve different purposes. For example, DHCP (Dynamic Host Configuration Protocol) is used for dynamically assigning IP addresses to devices on a network but does not perform any address resolution itself. HTTP (Hypertext Transfer Protocol) is designed for transferring hypertext documents over the web and is unrelated to address translation. FTP (File Transfer Protocol) is employed for transferring files between computers on a network and has no role in mapping IP addresses to MAC addresses.